Humanitas

t Humanitas
VOLUME 3, NO. 4 SPRING, J 968 ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY
HUMANITAS is a publication of the President's
Advisory Council on Humanities and Professional Research
Dr. Stanislaus Akielaszak Dr. Elisabeth J. Doyle
Chairman Editor
John M. O'Shaughnessy
Publications Editor
Cover design and additional art by Prof. Claude Ponsot, Fine Arts.
Cover photographs courtesy United Nations.
CONTENTS
Educating For Peace .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. Page 3
Heretic, 1968: one who "denies the primacy of peace and
looks upon war as indif/erent or thinks it can ever be waged
indiscriminately"
English Literature and the Publication Syndrome .............. Page 7
Pity the poor Ph.D., especially the younger one, in English.
Filling the Slate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 8
A noted aut/iority on the vice-presidency offers some
election year thoughts on the folly of choosing running mates
who differ widely with one another on basic issues.
Music and Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . Page 1 O
In which "musical composition is seen to be a logical process
involving both inductive and deductive methods."
How Different are the Germans? .. ...................................... Page 11
An interesting comparison of two educational systems by
one who knows both intimately, as student and educator.
Survey of Alumni of the Political Science
Graduate Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. Page 12
SIU graduate Political Science degree recipients found to
be well prepared, occupationally and for further study.
Machiavelli e ii Machiavellismo tra la Storia la Politica .... .. Page 14
The influence of Machiavelli upon Politics, History and
Philosophy.
Copernicus, Hooke, and Simplicity . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 15
A twentieth century philosopher explores the mind and
method of Robert Hooke, seventeenth century natural
philosopher and defender of Copernicus' view of the Universe.
Also in this issue:
Shakespeare Quiz, page 5 . . . Special Programs, page 6
... Poetry, pages 6, 19 ... Faculty Notes, page 20-22.
Convocation : Education for
Peace .. March 22-2 7
KEYNOTE SPEAKER is James Finn,
Editor of Worldview and author of
"Protest: Pacificism and Politics".
BRADFORD BACHRACH
PRINCIPAL ADDRESS at the closing
dinner will be delivered by Most Rev.
John J . Dougherty, chairman of the
U. S. Bishops Commission on World
Justice and Peace.
OTHER SPEAKERS and panelists in­clude:
Dr. Tom Stonier, biologist and
author of Nuclear Disaster; Rev. Rich­ard
McSorley, S.J., of the School of
Foreign Service, Georgetown Univer­sity;
Dr. Gordon Zahn, author of War,
Conscience and Dissent; Rev. Daniel
Maguire, Professor of Moral Theology,
Catholic University of America; Rev.
Anthony Schillaci, O.P., of the Na­tional
Film Study Project, Fordham
University; Hon. Francis Plimpton,
former U. S. Ambassador to the Uni­ted
Nations; Mrs. Eleanor Norton of
the American Civil Liberties Union ;
Professor Saul Mendlovitz of Rutgers
University; and Robert Theobald, Brit­ish
economist and author.
Educating for Peace
by
REV. JAM ES MEGIVERN, C.M., Theology
IN A SHORTER period than one man's lifetime, we
have witnessed the bloody slaughter of no less than
one hundred million of our fellow men. And this feat was
accomplished by what has blandly come to be called
"conventional" warfare. Our newly acquired nuclear po­tential
promises to dwarf these figures, for we are now
capable of unheard of records of mass annihilation, there­by
demonstrating our clear superiority to all previous
generations.
In the face of these awesome possibilities, the whole
process of higher education becomes a series of charades
so long as it continues to ignore the problem of war.
The importance of any problem is properly calculated
by the threat posed by its non-resolution. On this basis,
the medical profession is devoting great energy to the
search for a cure for cancer, since its presence negates all
other relative successes in maintaining human health. If this
same criterion were seriously applied to our present world
situation, it is difficult to imagine what problem could
possibly pre-empt that of war and peace in our order of
priorities.
"Hawk" and "dove" do not exhaust the vocabulary of
today's political ornithologist; to them must be added the
much more common species "ostrich", with the groves of
Academe as its natural habitat. Fortunately, however,
there are signs that things are changing in this regard, and
a number of serious organizations are working to call the
attention of educators to this crucial area.
An encouraging instance of student initiative has resul­ted
in the formation of the Student Forum on International
Order and World Peace (16 West 46th St., N.Y.), which
already has sponsored four conferences around the coun­try,
in an effort to stir up awareness of the problem.
"Most colleges and universities", declares one of their
statements, "do not offer their students courses on the
problems of war prevention and the establishment of
minimum world order. This is true of all disciplines and
departments, even of political science, international rela­tions,
and law. There is little opportunity for the student
to confront directly, systematically, and rigorously one of
the major issues of our time." As tomorrow's leaders,
these students have good reason to be concerned, for to­day's
leaders, unless things change considerably and quick­ly,
may leave them nothing to lead.
An even more significant development, however, is that
which is taking place among a growing number of educa­tors.
It beg'm in Paris in March, 1963, when a group of
concerned members of the academic community decided
to make an all-out effort to turn the direction of the mo­dern
university toward the pursuit of peace. The target
date is January J 969, the site chosen is the eternal city,
Rome, and the event is called The World Conference on
the Role of Universities in the Quest for Peace.
To make the Conference truly effective, the planners
realized that extensive spadework was necessary. Regional
meetings were held at the National University of San
Marcos in Lima, Peru , in November, 1964; at the Univer­sity
of Ibadan in Nigeria soon after, and at the Internation­al
Center of the State University of New York at Oyster
Bay last June.
Four commissions are at work in various areas: 1) on
the impact of science on international affairs and social
change; 2) on problems of international conflict and peace­ful
solution; 3) on economic and social development as a
common enterprise; and 4) on the education of teachers
and the public for international understanding.
The agenda for the Conference to be held at the Uni­versity
of Rome from January 13 to January 17, 1969, is
two-pronged. The first area of concentration is that of
university teaching: how to transform it in content, me­thods,
and materials so that it will no longer be so scan­dalously
unconcerned with the essential task of peace­making.
The second is that of organizing inter-university
cooperation, so as to prove effectively to the world that
the academic need not be synonymo~s with the irrelevant
and myopic.
Whither the Catholic Educator?
Our special concern should be the degree of involve­ment
of the Catholic 2cademic world. A glance at the
impressive list of participants in the Oyster Bay Confer­ence,
however, reveals that St. Louis was apparently the
only Catholic University represented. It will be ironic if,
in the very shadow of the Vatican next January, this most
significant event in the search for peace takes place with­out
significant Catholic participation.
There is much food for thought here. One can easily
become cynical and conclude that there is something about
being a Catholic that makes one uncatholic. Protestations
to the contrary are of little help when so much evidence
has to be swept under the rug.
Granted that the problem is not unique to our age. The
famous Dutch j•1rist, Grotius, a contemporary of St.
Vincent dePaul , noted in his classic treatise De Belli oe
Pacis that in the Christian world of his day "I observed
a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barba­rous
races would be ashamed of; I observed that men
ru shed to arms for slight causes or no cause at all. And
when arms are once taken up, there is no longer any re­spect
for law, divine or human; it is as if, in accordance
with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose for
the committing of all crimes." ( Prolegomena, par. 28).
Many persons are concerned about signs of decreasing
interest in the Church in our day. They search for explana­tions
in various directions, but much of the problem is
certainly rooted here. The yawning chasm between the
teaching of Christ and the attitudes of Christians has to be
the prototype of all "credibility gaps." The reasons for
it are undoubtedly complex, but the fact is clear. When
it comes to a question of priorities, it is often nationalism
that is the basic religion, and Christianity is acceptable
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only so long as it allows itself to be twisted into a sorry
support for the national military program.
Carleton J. H. Hayes described this in classical style over
four decades ago in his Essays on Nationalism. Further
evidence of it is found in the malaise which modern
Christians feel when confronted with the Sermon on the
Mount, as compared with the ease with which they can
listen to a militarist such as Hellmuth von Moltke, who
once wrote, "Perpetual peace is a dream - and not even
a beautiful dream - and War is an integral part of God's
ordering of the Universe. In War, Man's noblest virtues
come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty
and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop short of
offering up Life itself. Without War the world would be­come
swamped in Materialism." ( cf. Arnold Toynbee,
War and Civilization, p. 16).
Such is the mythology to which we are subject. The
shortcomings in this regard are recognized today, at least
by some serious scholars, such as Roland Bainton in his
Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace and Stanley
Windass in Christianity versus Violence. But the criticism
they level against past generations seems close to praise
when compared with what may await our generation.
In the Second World War we suffered a breakdown of
morality that has as yet scarcely been realized. Some of it
was the result of naked vengeance; but the fact remains that,
somewhere in the middle of that conflict, we allowed
ourselves to slip into the immoral tactics of the fascists
we were trying to defeat. Unconditional surrender and
collective extermination came to be so taken for granted
that there was hardly a protest when it came time to in­cinerate
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Road to Moral Chaos
The pathos of the resultant situation is well expressed
by Lewis Mumford: "The total nature of our moral break­down,
accurately predicted a half century ago - along
with the atom bomb - by Henry Adams, can be gauged
by a single fact: most Americans do not realize that this
change has taken place or, worse, that it makes any differ­ence.
They have no consciousness of either the magnitude
of their collective sin or the fact that, by their silence, they
have individually condoned it ... Many of our professed
religious and moral leaders have steadily shrunk from
touching this subject." ("The Morals of Extermination"
in Break-through to Peace, p. 20).
That final sentence brings us to the question of what a
Catholic university in contemporary America should be
doing about world peace. Vatican II did not hesitate to
~ell all Catholic educators that their "most weighty task
1s the effort to instruct all in fresh sentiments of peace."
Much of the clarity and forcefulness of the Church's
teaching in this regard, especially since Pope John's Pacem
in Terris, must obviously be seen as compensation for past
failures . Christians have been singularly successful in pull­ing
God's mantle over their campaigns of fratricide,
whether it be in the Crusades or during the subsequent
"wars of religion," thereby distorting the Prince of Peace
into their favorite War-Lord.
The Christian educator is thus assigned a key area for
"aggiornamento". A university that claims to be Catholic,
and is not pulling its weight in promoting a reorientation
of Christian thinking about war and peace, is being un­faithful
to its mandate.
For those who find the whole phenomenon of change
in the Church difficult to accept, the temptation to ignore
or dismiss the progress represented in recent Church
teaching will be strong. Curiously, it is too often the social
teaching of the Church that many Catholics succeed in
ignoring, while still managing to call themselves Catholic.
As a result, a would-be Catholic university has an added
responsibility to help clarify this scandalous anomaly by
putting all the cards on the table.
Instead of allowing a Catholic to be defined in terms
of Sunday Mass obligation, true Christian doctrine puts
the emphasis elsewhere. "A man is a heretic when he does
not admit that all men are brothers; he is a heretic when
he does not admit that he ought to love his enemies; he is
a hereti~ when he thinks he ought to love wealth and try
to acqmre as much of it as possible, even if he takes pains
not sin ... " (Abbe J. Leclercq, "Are There Moral He­resies?"
in Cross Currents of Psychiatry and Catholic
Morality). We might add that he is a heretic if he denies
the primacy of peace and looks upon war as indifferent,
or thinks it can ever be waged indiscriminately or without
the constant search for alternative solutions.
. The responsibility that is ours as a Catholic university
1s compounded by the fact that we are an American uni­versity.
Our tradition has been one that glorifies violence.
Born in revolution and expanded by massacre of the In­dians,
we have gone from war to war and painted this
historr ~n unrelieved hues of nobility, glory and heroism.
All this 1s fine for a Fourth of July harangue, but a univer­~
ity should be more sophisticated. Otherwise, a mentality
1s produced that is a real hazard to our fellow man. One
gets locked into a position where recourse to violence is
the automatic answer. Our "western" movies bear constant
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witness to the prevalence of this myth in our society. In
a showdown we always reach for the gun.
It is one of the ironic features of our present situation
that while this formula is once more endorsed as valid in
Vietnam, there is a great outcry and furor when by simple
logic it is applied domestically by those condemned to
the ghetto. Yet one cannot have it both ways: if total
violence is the accepted language for settling disputes, it
will be spoken at home as well as abroad. The point is,
unless serious efforts are made in educating to alternatives,
the present heresy of solution-by-total-violence will con­tinue
to prevail. A society should be able to rely on edu­cational
institutions to recognize and foster what is best
rather than what is worst in its tradition.
A further argument can be drawn from the fact that
we are not only a Catholic university, not only Americans,
but also members of the nuclear age. Once again it is
simply a question of common sense. Times have changed.
Man has at his disposal weapons capable of annihilating
civilization. Thus a border dispute is no longer a border
dispute, but a spark with the potential of igniting the
conflagration of the universe. Kenneth Boulding has said
that "if the human race is to survive, it will have to change
its ways of thinking more in the next 25 years than in the
last 25,000." If educators are not laboring to effect this
change, who will? One way or the other, we are faced
with monumental change. The only question is whether
it will be the fruitful change which a university worthy of
the name can help to bring about, or the change that will
be announced by a global mushroom cloud.
Most of the foregoing has dealt with the area of motiva­tion,
of reasons why a contemporary American Catholic
university should have a special commitment and interest
in promoting the thoughts and actions that contribute to
world peace. As always, the transition from the "why" to
the "how" is more difficult. It presupposes a group of
people sufficiently convinced of the importance of the
work to be willing to spend time on it. This, as we have
seen, is what is as yet quite absent from the scene, especi­ally
among Catholics.
The University of Chicago fostered the work of Quincy
Wright (A Study of War) , Harvard encouraged the con­tribution
of Pitirim Sorokin; the University of Michigan
promotes the Journal of Conflict Resolution as well as the
Journal of Behavioural Science, including many studies in
the area of peace research. The International Peace Re­search
Institute in Oslo, Norway, publishes its findings in
the Journal of Peace Research, while the University of
Pennsylvania sponsors the Peace Research Society Inter­national.
Princeton has the Center for International
Studies; Columbia, Northwestern, Yale, and Stanford all
have institutes.
In Manhattan, we have the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, the Center for War/ Peace Studies,
the Council on Religion and International Affairs, and any
number of other organizations of revelance. The significant
absence of Catholic participation, interest, contribution,
or awareness of this vital dimension of the educational
task is disturbing, to say the least. Manhattan College de­cided
to break the ice with its Pacem-in-Terris Institute,
and it would be most encouraging to see a few other Ca­tholic
institutions follow suit. All it takes is a handful of
people with enough sense of responsibility and willingness
to collaborate in exploring the essentials of human survival.
Shakespeare for Televiewers
by
VERONICA M.S. KENNEDY, English
The following are summaries of Shakespearian plays as
they might appear in TV Guide. Identify them:
1. A stagestruck student investigates a murder.
2. Teenagers struggle against prejudice.
3. A family drifts apart because of greed and sex.
4. A wayward youth causes his father anxiety.
5. Interracial strife and juvenile delinquency plague a
retired general.
6. An immigrant girl struggles to find her identity and
achieves happiness.i
7. A young country girl beomes a doctor and finds
romance.
8. Cave men help a princess in disguise.
9. A mother's boy makes good.
10. A small town Casanova gets his comeuppance.
11. Personal problems confuse an immigrant who has
joined the Army.
12. Coeds charm eggheads into romance.
13. A slumming socialite mingles with the underworld.
14. A cripple gets his revenge on society.
15. An alcoholic finds romance in the Orient.
(Answers on Page 22)
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OTHER SPECIAL PROGRAMS
In addition to the Education for Peace Convocation, a number of other special
programs have been or will be offered by various departments of the Univer­sity.
Some of them are described below.
ASIAN STUDIES CENTER
Summer Study in Chinese Language
and Culture
For the eighth consecutive year, St.
John's University will offer scholar­ships
for summer study in Chinese
language and culture, as a result of a
grant from the Sino-American Cultural
Society in Washington, D. C.
During the Summer of 1968, Chi­nese
language courses will be offered
on four levels-elementary, intermedi­ate,
semi-advanced, and advanced. The
culture courses will treat the history,
government, and politics of East Asia.
The program, interdisciplinary in na­ture,
is conducted by the University's
Center of Asian Studies in cooperation
with the Departments of History, Po­litical
Science, and Modern Foreign
Languages.
FINE ARTS
The Dept. of Fine Arts is presenting
a four part series on Film during the
current semester. The first program
took place on Thursday, March 14th
when Dr. Richard J. Meyer, Director
of School Television Services for
WNDT/Channel 13 in New York
City spoke on: "D. W. Griffith: Father
of the Film as an Art Form." Three
Griffith films were shown: "The Lone­dale
Operator" ( 1911) with Blanche
Sweet; "The Musketeers of Pig Alley"
( 1912) with Lillian Gish and "The
Avenging Conscience" ( 1914) with
H. B. Walthall. Dr. Meyer was form­erly
the Head of the Communications
Department at Wichita State Univer­sity,
Wichita, Kansas, and faculty ad­visor
to the Wichita Film Society. He
has written articles on film and com-
HAIKU*
by
LYNN S. MARTIN, English
Plum blossoms falling
In the mist along the road
Traveller's footprints.
,:, Editor's Note: The haiku is a class­ical
Japanese verse form which has
three lines of five, seven, and five
syllables each.
munications media for Film Comment Several courses in the field have
magazine, NAEB JOURNAL, The been recommended as additions to the
Journal of Broadcasting and A-V Com- curriculum. They include Linguistics
munications Review. Coordinators of 150, Introduction to Linguistics - a
the series are Prof. Jordan Myers of three-hour course on the study and
the Fine Arts Dept. and senior English use of languages, their classification
major Sal Fallica. and diffusion, types of phonetic change,
The second program in the series semantic change, and the history of lin­will
be given on Monday, April 1st "' guistic science in the nineteenth and
when Gordon Hitchens, Editor of twentieth centuries (knowledge of at
Film Comment magazine will lecture least one language in addition to En­on:
"The American Independent Film glish would be a prerequisite for this
Makers." The final two programs will course) ; and English 14, Structural
be announced at a later date. and Transformational Grammatical
LINGUISTICS
In view of the nationwide and state­wide
interest in linguistics, especially
the adoption and distribution by the
New York State Education Depart­ment
of textbooks with a linguistic
orientation, Father Devine has asked
Dr. Stanislaus Akielaszek ( Classical
Languages), Dr. John Cosentini (Mo­dern
Foreign Languages: French), Dr.
Thomas D. Houchin (Speech and
Theatre), Dr. Lynn S. Martin (Eng­lish),
Dr. Hilda Radzin (Modern For­eign
Languages: German), and Dr.
John Reynolds (Modern Foreign Lan­guages:
Spanish) to serve on a per­manent
Interdepartmental Committee
on Linguistics. Dr. Houchin will serve
as chairman and Dr. Martin as secre­tary
of the group.
The committee's objectives are: to
coordinate present linguistic course
offerings throughout the university; to
encourage linguistic orientation of
appropriate existing courses, develop­ment
of additional linguistic courses
where necessary, and more efficient
use of existing university resourses in
linguistics; and to stimulate appropri­ate
departments, such as Mathematics,
Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthro­pology
and Sociology, which could
contribute to a program in linguistics,
to develop courses in this area. The
committee hopes to be able to offer a
graduate "Introduction to Linguistics"
in the Fall Semester 1969 and hopes
that the English Department will be
able to offer an undergraduate "Struc­tural
and Transformational Gramma­tical
Analysis" beginning at the same
time.
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Analysis-a three-hour course dealing
with inadequacies and inaccuracies of
traditional English grammar; modern
attempts to describe the functioning of
English language more accurately;
structural approaches, and the trans­formational
approach.
In addition, the following courses
which are already in the University
catalog have been recommended for
inclusion in the interdepartmental pro­gram:
English 210. Old English; En­glish
211. Beowulf; French 110.
French Phonetics; French 303. History
of the French Language; Spanish 110.
Spanish Phonetics; Spanish 303. His­tory
of the Spanish Language; Ro­mance
Linguistics 302. Comparative
Romance Linguiistics; Speech 81.
Phonetics.
In the School of Education: Edu­cation
71.5. Secondary School Me­thods.
Language - English Composi­tion,
oral English and Literature;
Education 71. 7. Secondary School
Methods. Modern Foreign Language;
Education 71.13. Secondary School
Methods. Latin.
Also the following infrequently
taught languages: Chinese 207. Chi­nese
Dialects; Chinese 208. Gramma­tical
Structure; Chinese 302. Chinese
Linguistics; Chinese 303. History of
the Chinese Language; Russian 1 ;2.
Elementary Russian; Russian 3 ;4.
Intermediate Russian; Swahili 101 ;102.
Conversational Swahili.
The chairman of the committee,
Dr. Houchin, would appreciate hearing
from both faculty members and stu­dents
with a special interest or prepara­tion
in linguistics.
English Literature and the Publication Syndrome
by
RICHARD J. DIRCKS, English
YEARS AGO we were just faculty. Now we're senior
faculty and junior faculty, tenured faculty and unten­ured
faculty, Ph.D.'s and non-Ph.D.'s, and perhaps most
crucial of all, publishing Ph.D.'s and non-publishing
Ph.D.'s. Each group has its pressing problems, but the
academic dilemma faced by the non-publishing Ph.D. is
as disturbing as any. He is asked to achieve a publication
record or face extinction. But time and the statistics of
research publication in English language and literature
reveal odds that are distinctly unfavorable.
FiQding an outlet for research is highly competitive and
the screening of material submitted to journals rigorous.
Most of the leading periodicals subject material to evalu­ation
by three specialists before final acceptance. The
young scholar, moreover, is in competition for space with
the many thousands of senior professors who also must
publish in order to maintain their competitive positions.
Revealing statistics are presented by John Lavelle in an
article in the November, 1966 issue of Proceedings of the
Modern Language Association, the leading critical journal
in modern languages. He tells us that of 600 research
articles submitted to PMLA during 1965 only seventy
were published. These included articles dealing with all
other modern foreign languages in addition to English.
The Philological Quarterly, a highly respected and long
established journal, maintained the same ratio, publishing
40 of 330 offerings. English Literary History, with a more
specialized approach focussing on literary history, publish­ed
30 out of 300. The more recently established Texas
Studies in Literature and Language accepted 3 8 of 251
submissions. Another comparatively recent periodical,
Criticism, received 225 articles and accepted 14. The
length of time between acceptance and publication in these
journals ranged from nine to eighteen months. Accepted
material was screened by three readers in each of the
journals mentioned, except ELH which required two.
Lavelle publishes statistics on almost all journals in the
field, and an examination of them will confirm that this
is a representative selection of the more prestigious
journals.
The new Ph.D. faces the prospect of numerous rejec­tions
even if his work is of the highest quality, and each
rejection may cost as much as six months of time before
a decision is reached. The typical new Ph.D. begins with
an effort to sharpen and publish chapters of his dissertati@n
for submission to scholarly journals. In rare instances; he
may be fortunate enough to have a university press pub­lish
his study in its entirety. In either case, he risks the
censure of the administrator who may observe that he
reaJJy has done no research beyond his degree and hardly
merits promotion. The fact of the matter is that in almost
every case in which a thesis is published, whether as a
book or a series of articles, additional work has been done,
at least of a confirmatory nature, and the work has been
scrutinized by impartial and discriminating specialists.
Another area of difficulty for the young scholar is a
widespread misunderstanding about notes. In many dis­ciplines,
the fact that the result of months of research is
often productive of only a few pages of printed text is
routinely accepted. In literature, there too often is the
expectation that quantity is somehow related to quality.
This is obviously not so, and short articles or notes often
contain considerable significant material. Curiously, it is
often as difficult to publish notes as longer articles, and
the waiting time is frequently as great. Notes and Queries,
the century old publication of the Oxford University Press,
accepts notes varying from a few paragraphs to 2,500
words. Although the periodical generally tries to publish
within eighteen months, delays for longer notes may ex­tend
to two years. Contributors to the more recently
established American Notes and Queries face the same
delays. Although notes are also published in English
Language Notes which accepted 60 of 353 submissions
in 1965, a few of the journals that publish longer articles
also accept notes.
Catholic higher education contributes relatively little
to the publication of literary research. Thought, a contem­porary
review, and Traditio, dealing with medieval studies,
are specialized outlets of significance. But there is no
major journal in which research in the broad areas of
English and American literature can find a home. Rena­sence
generally limits its material to studies of religious
implications of contemporary subjects. Some of the more
popular Catholic magazines such as The Critic, Common­weal,
and America publish a limited number of contempo­rary
critical essays.
The difficulty encountered in research, writing, and ac­tual
publication is, however, only the initial challenge the
new Ph.D. faces. The odds are escalated by the procedure
followed in evaluating applications for promotion and
tenure. In many cases final decisions are reached by in­dividuals
with no experience in the discipline of the can­didate.
Consider, for example, the plight of the anthro­pologist
as he attempts to judge an article dealing with
dramatic tension in Joyce, or the engineer who would evalu­ate
an article on psychological motivation in Shakespeare's
comedies. Yet this is essentially the system that the young
Ph.D. must try to beat, because personnel and budget
committees on the college level seldom have a majority
composed of scholars in the aspiring professor's own or
related areas. The myth that the problem of publication
is the same in all disciplines persists and is advanced most
devotedly by those with the least knowledgeable experi­ence.
Optimism should prevail, however, for in time the
rewarding reality of the first published article will come.
The months or years of research and writing will seem
short; the soul-benefitting experience of submission, re­jection,
submission, and final acceptance will reward the
heart with a rich glow of satisfaction; and the pleasure
of presenting a fresh-off-the-press offprint to an adminis­trative
superior will be a moment of triumph. The young
scholar can be certain of receiving warm words of en­couragement:
"And what else, my lad?"
Come to think of it, wouldn't it be -nice to be just faculty
again?
-7-
Filling The Slate
by
IRVING G. WILLIAMS, History
FOR ANY American to profess unawareness that 1968
is a presidential election year is inconceivable amid
today's flurry of presidential preference primaries, willing
"non-candidates," peace candidates, third party candi­dates,
and ex-candidates, Election fever is on us once
again-but with a difference. This year, the task of select­ing
vice-presidential candidates for each of the party slates
assumes more importance than it ever has before.
Where, in the past, geographic balance was often more
important to a winning slate than the personal compat­ibility
of the presidential and vice-presidential choices,
this year the question of the vice-president's political
philosophy will asume overriding importance. The im­portance
is not limited, furthermore, to the mere matter
of electing a pair of winners to the two top offices in the
land. In this last third of the twentieth century, it would
be nothing less than disastrous to choose for the vice­presidency
anyone who is not himself of presidential
capabilities and/ or who is out of tune with the president.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt must have been thinking
along these lines when, even before he ran for Governor
of New York, he wrote in March, 1928, to one of the
Democratic professionals:
I have been convinced for several months that the Vice-
Presidential candidate should come from the South ... .
Cordell Hull would make an excellent choice .... I . . .
believe that the nominee ... should be chosen with the
thought that the Almighty might call on him to succeed
to the presidency, and Hull would make a fine President.
Hull, of course, never made even Vice-President; but
Roosevelt undoubtedly was thinking of the crippling illness
which nearly carried President Wilson off in 1919. He
also was probably recalling his own unsuccessful cam­paign
for the vice-presidency as Governor Cox's running
mate in 1920. Roosevelt, of all people, would be aware
of how suddenly grave illness strikes and destroys all
personal and political plans and time tables. Much later
on, the ailing Roosevelt of 1944 could not know that his
approval of Harry S. Truman to run with him would result
in the latter's being called by "the Almighty" to succeed
him eighty-three days after the start of the fourth term.
And the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 only
re-enforces for our generation the idea that the second
man on the ticket is a putative President of the United
States.
There have been eight occasions of transfer of the
presidency by reason of the death of the incumbent. We
shall refer to these very shortly. But can anyone doubt
there will be a ninth? Since no one can tell where or when
the next succession by death may occur, the only sensible
thing to do is to take due precaution to cushion the shock
when the unexpected happens. Painful as it is for Repub­licans
to contemplate it, perhaps the greatest legacy left
by John F. Kennedy to the American nation was his Vice­President.
Certainly the transition from the one to the
other was the smoothest during parlous times we have
ever experienced. Thus perhaps the most fateful party
decision JFK made was at the 1960 Democrat Convention
when he proferred the vice-presidential nomination to his
erstwhile majority leader and rival for the presidential
nomination.
This year's presidential election will be the first held
since the adoption of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the
Constitution in 1967. This amendment provides pro­cedures
for the vice-president to be an Acting President
of the United States in case of the President's suffering a
crippling illness. In the whole history of the nation we
have never had an Acting President. We enter upon terra
incognita in this regard. But one thing is certain: the
likelihood of a vice-president exercising presidential func­tions
has been increased. On at least three occasions in
the past there would have been opportunity for temporary
or earlier permanent successions to the exercise of presi­dential
functions if this constitutional clarification had
been on the books. Consider, for example, the eighty day
period that elapsed between the shooting of President
Garfield and his demise in 1881; the many months of
Wilson's stroke and partial paralysis in 1919-1920, and
Eisenhower's three illnesses in 1955 and later. Nor has
President Johnson himself been beyond hospitalization
and surgery on occasion. He is also a member of long­standing
in the coronary club. We can therefore reason­ably
expect that in the future Vice-Presidents will ad­minister
the presidency on at least a temporary basis. For
now there are no constitutional and legal doubts that in
such circumstances a vice-president is simply a stand-in,
a locum tenens for the ailing chief executive.
The importance, then, of selecting vice-presidential
choices with the two qualifications heretofore mentioned
is underscored. To repeat them: he must be presidential
timber himself and he must be politically, philosophically,
and personally attuned to the presidential nominee.
T.R.: Theory and Practice
This latter aspect of the question is what the Republican
Roosevelt had in mind during the 1896 campaign when
he wrote: "It is an unhealthy thing to have the Vice­President
and President represented by principles so far
apart that the succession of one to the place of the other
means a change as radical as any party overturn." The
additional possibility of temporary successions in the
future only re-enforces Theodore Roosevelt's argument.
It is unthinkable, for instance, that a moderate Republican
President, temporarily felled by some incapacitating illness,
should have his office administered by a conservative
Republican Acting President totally unsymphathetic to
the policy and personnel of the Administration. There
would be chaos. The same would hold true, of course, if
a Goldwater-type President should be temporarily (or
permanently) replaced by a Javits-type Vice-President.
It was the supreme irony that only four years after T.R.
had made his pronouncement that the national ticket should
be consistent at both ends, he himself was placed on the
party's ticket with President McKinley. The latter person-
-8-
ally disliked his Vice-President and had little to do with
him after the campaign; yet within a year, T.R. took over
from the assassinated President. Roosevelt would have
been the first to admit that his "Square Deal" policy was
quite opposite to the "full dinner pail" philosophy of
McKinley. T.R.'s succession proved his own argument
that the incompatibility of the 1900 Republican choices
caused in the circumstances "a change as radical as any
party overturn."
Republicans almost seem to have had a suicidal history
in this matter, for from the viewpoint of party majority
sentiment, the wrong vice-presidents have been in office
when Republican presidents have died.
Succession; the Historical Context
Let us consider the history of death-successions, the
only kind of accidental successions the nation has had
to date. They started before the Republican party was yet
born, but by general consensus, its ancestor was the Whig
party and it was under them that the curse started.
In 1840, the Whigs won their first victory over the
Democrats with a general (Harrison) and an ex-Democrat
(Tyler). One month after inauguration the general was
dead (of natural causes), and the Virginian ex-Democrat
took over. Former President John Quincy Adam's re­action
to this melancholy event was, it "places in the
Executive chair a man never thought of for it by any­body."
Theodore Roosevelt's own characterization of the
aftermath of the Tyler succession is apropos: "The presi­dency
fell into the hands of a man who had but a corpo­ral's
guard of supporters in the nation, who proceeded
to oppose all the measures of the immense majority of
those who elected him." We might add that not only did
the Whigs try to impeach Tyler and successfully read him
out of the party, but they also lost the next election. They
won again in 1848 with another general and a Whig from
New York (Fillmore) but once more saw their President
die a natural death (during the crisis of 1850). Nor was
Fillmore, though able, rewarded by a nomination the
next time around. The Democrats won in 1852, and the
Whig party disappeared permanently shortly after.
Rising from ashes of the defunct Whigs, the Repub­licans
won through to victory for the first time in 1860
with an ex-Whig, Abraham Lincoln, and an ex-Democrat,
Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. They won, as all parties do,
because the states they captured were the right ones to
give an electoral majority; but they collected only 40
per cent of the popular vote in a field of four tickets.
When it was election time again, the Civil War had beef<!
raging for more than three years, and the election issue
was the Union and the prosecution of the war. President
Lincoln refused to run as a Republican-it was a minority
party-and inspired for the occasion the formation of
the National Union Party to rally all who favored con­tinued
prosecution of the war regardless of party labels.
It was in this context that the inoffensive Vice-President
was dropped and Andrew Johnson substituted as the
running mate. Johnson was a Tennessee Democrat who
was right on the issues of support for the Union cause
and continued prosecution of the war to victory over the
South. The ticket won, but the price of victory came
high. The curse of the dead Whigs now hit the National
Unionists, nee Republicans. Booth's bullet found its mark
a month after the second inaugural, and the Democrat
from a state in secession had succeeded. Theodore Roose­velt's
assessment of this changeover was that Johnson
"tried to reverse the policy of the party which had put
him in office." What T.R. might better have remembered
was the acid comment of Thaddeus Stevens in 1864 to
the news that Johnson was to be Lincoln's new running
mate: "Can't you find a candidate for Vice-President in
the United States without going down to one of those
damned rebel provinces to pick one up?"
Representative Stevens would be one of the leaders in
the "Impeach Andrew Johnson" movement that came
within a vote of succeeding in the spring of '68. Stevens
vigorously prosecuted the charges before the bar of the
Senate. If the Republican party had failed to oust Johnson
from the White House they had, at any rate, ousted him
from their midst. Nor would the Democrats, reunited for
1868 election purposes, receive him as one of their own.
The Republicans' subsequent success in continuing to
prevail at the polls was due more to "waving the bloody
shirt" against "the party of disunion" than to competent
men and serious discussion of the issues. Emotionalism
masked the f°)]y of presenting incompatible tickets for
short-run purposes. Thus the selection of Garfield and
Arthur in 1880 was no better nor no worse than had
happened often enough before. Indeed, it had become a
Republican habit to balance the ticket ideologically as
well as geographically. No wonder Gideon Welles had
dismissed the vice-presidency as early as 1868 as not
"worthy of honorable aspiration."
Expediency, 1880 Style
When, therefore, in 1880 the Old Guard under Senator
Roscoe B. Conkling of New York was unsuccessful in
winning a third presidential nomination for General Grant,
"half-breed" Republican James A. Garfield of Ohio, had
been the compromise choice. Political "logic", as then
defined, required a peace overture to Grant stalwartism.
Thus the second place was given to Chester A. Arthur
of New York, Conkling's crony and chief enforcer. Arthur
had just two years before been ousted from his lucrative
post as Collector of the Port of New York by President
Hayes-a man who represented the same kind of Repub­lican
forces which had won victory over Grantism at the
18 80 convention. Yet now these reformist forces had
embraced Arthur at the first opportunity since they fired
him.
Perhaps the reform elements of the party were looking
on the bright side of things in the manner of Edwin L.
Godkin. That keeper of the nation's conscience commented
on the 1880 Republican ticket in The Nation. At least, he
said, New York was rid of Arthur's hand in Republican
state machine politics and, as Vice-President, Arthur could
do little mischief. Finally, it was consoling that since
Garfield was only forty-nine years old, his death "was
too unlikely a contingency to be worth making extra­ordinary
provision for." Perhaps the most fitting summary
of the prevailing attitude to the vice-presidency was the
widely quoted reaction to Garfield's death: "Chet Arthur,
President of the United States! Good God!"
It does not matter that Arthur was a competent Presi-
- 9-
dent - as were most of the other accidental ones, some
of them being, perhaps, even an improvement over the
original selections. Such an outcome was wholly fortuitous,
accidental itself and not due to deliberate and purposeful
party action. T.R.'s assessment of the Arthur affair was
"the death of Garfield meant complete overturn in the
personnel . . . The bitterness caused by his succession
to power nearly tore the party in twain." The Republican
party's essential attitude to Arthur was demonstrated at
the Convention of 1884 when they passed him over for
a chance at a term in his own right, and the Democrats
then won the White House for the first time in a quarter­century.
As an accidental President himself, Theodore Roosevelt
strove manfully to overcome that part of the party's curse
that had seen such presidents rejected four times for a
presidential nomination at the next convention. Roosevelt
succeeded. By winning the 1904 Republican nomination
-and election-he started a precedent which to date has
always held through the three later occasions that have
occurred in this century. Paradoxically he, of all people,
bowed in 1904 to the old line "practical" reasons for a
balanced ticket, accepting as his running mate an Old
Guard adherent in whom he had little confidence.
Republicans have been free of the curse of accidental
succession for over forty years now. Indeed, within that
time span, the Democrats have finally had their own
experiences with it in its modified form. Nevertheless, the
Harding-Coolidge ticket of 1920 was not planned that
way. As far as the party rulers were concerned, Coolidge
was an accident long before Harding died in 1923. The
nomination of Coolidge was a freak. It represented mo­mentary
rebellion of a hitherto docile convention who
were sick and tired of taking orders. Thus the cry of
"Coolidge! Coolidge!" by his "corporal's guard" of con­vention
and gallery supporters uttered at the psychologi­cally
strategic moment accomplished the overthrow of
the authorized selection, Senator Irvine H. Lenroot. That
Coolidge as President succeeded where Harding failed is,
again, not germane here. The party did not choose him
at all in relation either to Harding or to the requirements
of the vice-presidential office. But the bad odor of the
Harding days-and nights-was fumigated by the Puritan
in Babylon, to use William Allen White's expressive term.
Coolidge got the party's nod for the presidential nomina­tion
in 1924 because it could do nothing else. He was the
politician without an organization whom the Old Guard
had to take in expiation for its sins.
Democrat experience with succession by death has not
been at all harmful to them. And why? Because, luck
aside, when their residents have died, the Vice-Presidents
have been able to carry on in the mold already established.
Their transitions have been relatively smooth (F. D.
Roosevelt to Truman, Kennedy to Johnson). The move­ment
from the New Deal to the Fair Deal and from the
New Frontier to the Great Society has been a logical
progression. Thus on both occasions, because of the basic
compatibility of the convention choices originally, the
subsequent convention has gone along with the successor.
In both instances that accidental president has won the
ensuing election.
For Republicans in 1968, the conclusion appears to
b:! clear. They must weigh very carefully both ends of
their prospective ticket. They must weigh each man con­sidered
for the bottom half in the light of his ability to
get along with the man at the top and in the light of his
own qualifications to be an Acting President or President.
Any "smart" politics contrary to the above could well
lead to disaster at the polls for this reason alone. Even
if such a ticket did come through to electoral victory, the
boomerang of history still lies about. It seems to have a
fatal fascination for the Republican party. Perhaps George
Santayana had us in mind when he wrote: "A nation that
forgets its history is condemned to repeat it."
Music and Logic
by
ALFRED PIKE, Fine Arts
THE INTRINSIC order of music - its formal structure, motives, themes, chords, and so on. These musical images
its functional aspect - is often compared to traditional are not concepts, but percepts, and the creative artist is
logic. From this analogous viewpoint, musical composition concerned with their logical development, as well as with
is seen to be a logical process involving both inductive their expressive relationships. (From a psychological point
and deductive methods. The most important part of this of view, music-logic consists not only of a system of pos-process
is induction, which is the logical counterpart of tulative operations, but also of intellectual feelings and
intuition, and, in a musical sense consists of the selection responses.)
of postulates (motives, themes, and so forth). Through Organization is the logical function of music, and this
deduction these postulates are extended into a developing ordering begins with the smallest formal unit, the motive.
musical context. (The process of deduction is also used Through a synthetic, cumulative procedure, the motive
by the composer for any corrections or revisions.) . gradually evolves into the phrase, period, section, and
It should be added parenthetically that the composer is movement. In addition, the logical axioms of identity,
seldom explicitly aware of the logic in which he is involved, contradiction, and the law of the excluded middle embrace
but the same laws of thought apply to his tonal reasoning the meaning of both formal, and music-logic.
that apply to the logician in his preoccupation with verbal The first canon, identity, has relevance to the selection
forms . The composer does not consciously mold his inner of a postulate. Once the composer has chosen an initial
tonal imagery in accordance with universal laws. He is postulate ( a motive or theme) he is restricted by its
involved, in a phenomenological manner, with individual identity. He cannot do anything which arbitrarily destroys
-10-
the identity of the theme. He can decide to begin with
another theme; but this is merely a change of identity.
However, a theme may have common qualities with other
themes which allow its use in combination.
For the law of contradiction, we will substitute a law
of contrast, for a musical postulate cannot be said to con­tradict
itself or anything else. By "contrast," however, we
mean that any musical postulate may be compared to, or
contrasted with, another dissimilar postulate.
The two preceding canons are supplemented by the
law of the excluded middle: Either A is B or A is not B,
but A may be partly B, partly non-B. A may be both B
and C, if B and C are not diametrically opposed. Consider­ed
in a developmental musical context this law would be
revealed in the association between a given postulate and
succeeding structural units, so formulated as to display
similar, but significantly differentiated, characteristics.
Logical procedure in musical composition may also be
compared to the moods of classical logic. Although music
cannot argue syllogistically nor give any criteria of truth
and untruth, it does resemble, in the arrangement and
development of its tonal premises, the order and organi­zation
of the three propositions of a syllogism. In the Aris­totelian
syllogism, the second and third propositions (its
minor premise and conclusion) are deductions of the ini­tial
postulate or major premise. In music, major premises
correspond to motives or themes, minor premises are
analogous to the applications of various devices used in
the development of thematic material ( variation, augmen­tation,
and so on) , while conclusions are the final issues
of premises which reach their ultimate meaning in the
concluding thematic treatment of a composition (Coda) .
Although traditional logic and music-logic resemble
each other in certain formal aspects, they also differ. As
we have seen, musical analogues to formal logic are easily
found and have perhaps been oversimplified here; but
other logical categories - universals, particulars, truth,
untruth, and others - are without musical counterparts.
How different are the Germans?
by
EBERHARD E. ScHEUING, Marketing
JN 1936, the great German-American psychologist Kurt
Lewin published an article entitled "Some Social­psychological
Differences Between the United States and
Germany." His findings are still valuable enough to be
presented to a 1968 audience, slightly modified by some
personal experiences.
To one who comes from Germany [he wrote], the degree
of freedom and independence of children and adoles­cents
in the United States is very impressive. Especially
the lack of servility of the young child toward adults or
of the student toward his professor is striking. The
adults, too, treat the child much more on an equal foot­ing,
whereas in Germany it seems to be the natural right
of the adult to rule and the duty of the child to obey.
The natural relation of adult and child is in the United
States not considered that of a superior (Herr) to a
subordinate (Vntergebener) but that of two individuals
with the same right in principle. (pp. 6 f.)
The extremely negative tone of this statement does not
fit the situation any more. The German family is still
patriarchal and parent-centered as compared with the
child-centered American home that is in many cases
dominated by the wife's personality and decisions. German
education still insists on discipline and respect for th~
authority of adults and professors, but it is not nearly
as strict any more as described above. Children and adoles­cents
are granted more and more freedom and influence
as they grow up and gain more insights. For one brought
up in this system, it is difficult to see that it has had any
negative influence on the formation and development of
personality. To the contrary, external and internal disci­pline
have helped this writer to shape his own life very
clearly.
Having observed the extreme permissiveness of Ameri­can
parents, the problems in teaching the end product
of this psuedo-education are not at all astonishing. The
comparison between the American and German education-al
philosophies corresponds somewhat with the differences
between Rousseau and Pestalozzi. It is my conviction that
the child and the adolescent need understanding and
guidance, not just a plain laissez-faire attitude. Paradoxi­cally,
the German student - having been disciplined early
in his life - enjoys much greater freedom than his Ameri­can
counterpart; for, as Lewin noted
In spite of his greater independence, the American un­dergradu
ate, and even the graduate at the university in
many respects, stands under more school-like regulations
than the German student . . .
The student at the American university is likely to have
a fixed time-schedule worked out in advance for a much
longer period and in greater detail than does the German
student ... The common use of examinations at least
every half year, unknown in the German university, does
a good deal for cutting the work at the American univer­sity
into well-defined regions. (pp. 9 to 12)
In German universities, nobody will bother to take
attendance: from my sophomore year on, I did not attend
any course regularly but rather did study at home at my
convenience. Certain subject areas are required ; but the
choice of courses is completely up to the student. On
the other hand, it is up to the individual professor's de­cision
which of various courses he wants to offer each
term. A certain number of credits is necessary, but they
can be obtained in many different ways at any time.
Every person graduated from high school in modern
Germany has the constitutional right to a higher education.
If he or his parents cannot pay the $70 tuition a year and
$25 for a furnished room, the Federal government will
pay for his university education with the sole requirement
in return that he earn a satisfactory grade average ( c+ ).
Although many students work during vacation and some
even hold part-time jobs during the term, very few work
their way through the university. Inasmuch as, in a field
such as business administration for instance, a university
-11-
degree does not pay (not being required by the business
community) , German students tend to be more motivated
and serious in their studies. Very few of them are married
for two reasons: the average marriage age of women is still
22 to 24 years and for men 24 to 26 years of age; also,
as the German student would and could not go into debt,
he first has to complete his studies before he can get
married.
It has been said that the Americans are a highly or­ganized
people, i.e. that they belong to many organizations
throughout their lives. Lewin says that "the whole social
life in the United States shows some kind of uniformity"
(p. 17). Riesman's observation of "outer-directedness"
makes Americans much more susceptible to group norms
and group behavior than Germans. The common youth­mindedness
of the American society is not duplicated in
Germany - for instance, calling a group of . married
women "girls" might be flattering in this country but
would definitely be an insult in the author's home country.
Also, church-going is much Jess of a social affair in Ger­many.
There are the two large blocs composed of members
of the Catholic and Protestant churches, both of which
have a comparable membership of about 45 per cent of
the total population (close to sixty million) each; the
various religious groupings which share the remaining 10
per cent do not have any considerable influence. Dressing
up and showing off such items as new Easter hats and
dresses in church is unknown to the German woman.
Church activities of a social nature, such as dinners, par­ties,
and drives are negligible.
Germans tend to be individualistic in their way of life.
They do not care as much as do Americans what their
neighbor has or does. Most young Germans know at least
one - many two, some more foreign languages. Many
of them have seen other European countries, often not
as tourists but as guests in families during summer vaca­tion.
As far as the economic situation is concerned, there
are far fewer poor people in Germany; no slums will, there­fore,
be found in any German city. The general inclination
is more toward saving - which is encouraged by premi­ums
from the government - than toward spending. Con­spicuous
consumption plays a much less important role, a
50 per cent market share of Volkswagen indicates more
rationality in car buying. Apartment rents are relatively
lower, house prices much higher than in the United States.
The exodus from the cities has led, however, to the
growth of modern suburbia in Germany. Shopping centers
are gradually emerging but still meeting with hesitance
on the part of the consumer, especially because the Ger­man
suburban housewife is a 'green widow,' without a
second car to do her shopping, and because stores have
to close at 6 p.m.
Many developments in America seem to be followed
by Germany with an average time lag of at least ten years.
Slowly the German consumer is shifting from frequent
re-use of an item to throw-away consumption. But many
German households still do not have a freezer, and dryers
are completely unknown, though dish-washers are slowly
gaining acceptance. The market for tv-dinners and ready
cake-mixes is still unimportant, and the use of paper
products much Jess common than in the United States.
In summary, education in Germany is by no means
inferior to American education; the number of school drop­outs
does not seem to be higher than in this country. There
are fewer social activities, as the German tends to center
his life around his family .
A Survey of Alumni of the Political Science Graduate Programs
by
GERALD E. FITZGERALD, Political Science
JN ORDER to ascertain how well St. John's Political
Science graduate students had been prepared for further
study and for their careers, the writer recently conducted
a survey of alumni of the department's graduate programs.
Preliminary investigation disclosed that this involved a
total of 57 persons as of October 1967. The department's
first graduate degrees were conferred in 1959, and there­fore
a period of nine years would include all alumni.
Because the group to be surveyed consisted of a rela­tively
small number of individuals, the writer decided
to communicate with all of them, rather than use a sam­pling
technique. A checklist of alumni was prepared,
therefore, from departmental records and a three-page
questionnaire was constructed to elicit details concerning
present occupation, additional graduate study, and occu­pational
adjustment.
A copy of the questionnaire was mailed with a covering
letter to each alumnus in October. Respondents were
promised a current list of alumni for their co-operation.
Follow-up letters were mailed to non-respondents in
November, December, and January. Each contained an­other
copy of the questionnaire. Where mail was returned
as undeliverable, the records of the Alumni Office were
checked for a more recent address. In a few cases, after
the last mail follow-up , telephone calls were made to
non-respondents.
The response was excellent. Of 57 alumni, 52 respond­ed.
These included all four recipients of doctoral degrees
and 49 (or 93 per cent) of those who had received master's
degrees. (One alumnus received both master's and doctoral
degrees from us.) One of the remaining 5 alumni was
deceased, and 4 did not respond.
M. A. recipients were asked to indicate the under­graduate
institutions from which they had received
bachelor's degrees. Fourteen had St. John's University
degrees, 5 were from Fordham University, and there were
two each from Georgetown University, Iona College, Man­hattan
College, and Queens College. Represented by one
alumnus each were the following institutions: Adelphi
University, Albertus Magnus College, Athenaeum of Ohio,
Brooklyn College, Cathedral College (Brooklyn), Gannon
College, Gettysburg College, Holy Cross College, Hunter
College, University of Kentucky, Marist College, Mary
Immaculate College and Seminary, Marymount College,
Marywood College, Miami University (Florida), New
York State Teachers College at Albany, University of
-12-
]
]
Notre Dame, Notre Dame College (Staten Island) , St.
Joseph's College (Philadelphia), St. Joseph's College for
Women, St. Michael's College (Winooski), and Xavier
University (Cincinnati). Forty-nine respondents had at­tended
a total of 28 different undergraduate institutions.
The following graduate degrees were conferred by the
department upon the respondents:
I. GRADUATE ST. JOHN'S DEGREES Co~FERRED
Year Master's Degrees Doctoral Degrees
1959 2''' 0
1960 2 0
1961 0 0
1962 5 1
1963 2 1
1964 3 0
1965 8 2
1966 9 0
1967 18 0
TOTALS 49* 4
*Includes one Ph. D. recipient.
M. A. respondents were asked to indicate if they had
earned doctoral degrees, were engaged in graduate study,
were planning to do so, or had no plans for graduate study.
The responses were as follows:
II. PLANS FOR ADDITIONAL GRADUATE STUDY
Engaged in Planning
Year Earned Graduate Graduate N o
Graduated Doctorate Study Study Plans Total
1959 l * 1 0 0 2
1960 0 2 0 0 2
1961 0 0 0 0 0
1962 0 2 2 5
1963 0 0 0 2 2
1964 0 1 1 3
1965 0 3 3 2 8
1966 0 3 5 1 9
1967 0 6 5 7 18
1* 18 16 14 49
*Includes one Ph. D. respondent.
From the above figures, 1 of 49 respondents (2 per cent)
has earned a Ph.D. However, 18 of 49 are now engaged
in graduate work (36.8 per cent), and 16 of 49 are plan­ning
to undertake additional graduate work (32. 7 per cent).
The remainder, 14 of 49, have no definite plans for con­tinuing
graduate work (28.6 per cent). Thus, approximate­ly
70 per cent of the master's degree alumni have co9-­tinued
or plan to continue 2:raduate work. 0 ,
Most alumni are living in the New York-Long Island
area. Their residences (as opposed to temporary addresses)
are the following:
III. PRESENT LOCATION OF ALUMNI
Area N umber
New York City .... .... ...... .. .... .. 27
Nassau-Suffolk ............ ...... .... 11
New York State (excluding
the above) . . . .. . . . . ... . .. . .. . . ... ... 4
Elsewhere .. . . .. . .. . . .. . .. .. . . .. . . . . .. .. 10
Total ....... .. .. ........ .... ... .... 52
One alumnus received a St. John's doctorate in Political
Science in 1965. The 18 alumni now engaged in graduate
work are pursuing the programs shown below:
IV. LOCATION OF SUBSEQUENT GRADUATE WORK
Doctoral
Studies Doctoral Non-
Political Studies Doctoral
University Science Other Studies
St. John's u .......... 5 1 (History) 1 (Asian
Certif.)
New York U ......... 3 1 (History) 1 M.A.
(Education)
u. of Notre Dame 2
u. of Michigan ......
State U. of N.Y.
at Albany ...... .. ..
Georgetown u . .... 1 (History)
St. Mary's College 1 M.A.
(Biology)
Totals ................ 12 3 3
Alumni are engaged in the following occupations:
V. PRESENT OCCUPATIONS OF ALUMNI
Education
Elementary . . .. .. . ... ... . .. .. ... ...... .. ... ..... . 3
Secondary ... .. ... ....... ...... ......... ... .... ... 17
College .......... ...... .......... .... ...... ........ 8
Not Stated .......... .... .... ... .. .... .. .... .... ... 1
29
Government
Local Government . . .. .... ... .. .. .... .. ... .. 3
State Government ... .... ....... ..... .... ... .. 0
Federal Government ... ... ... .. ... ...... .. 4
Military Service . . . ..... ... ... .. .. . .... ... .. .. 4
11
Civic Organizations
Foreign Policy Association ... ..... .... 1
Full Time Student
Full Time Students ..... ... ... .. .... ... .... .. 4
4
Other Occupations
Other ..... .... .......... .. ..... .. ... ... .. .. ...... .... 7
7
Respondents were asked to indicate if they planned to
remain in their present occupation, if their training had
prepared them for it, and if their training was helpful in
their present occupation.
Of those planning to remain in their present occupations,
22 felt their training had prepared them, 6 did not, and 1
did not respond. However, 22 felt their training was help­ful
in the occupation, 2 did not, and 1 did not respond.
Of those not planning to remain, 4 felt the training had
prepared them, 1 did not, and 1 did not know. Yet 5 felt
their training was helpful, and 1 did not know.
Of those undecided as to whether or not to remain in
their present occupation, 5 felt their training had prepared
them, but 9 did not. Yet 9 felt their training was helpful
in the occupation, 2 did not, and 2 did not know.
Generally, it would appear that Political Science gradu­ate
alumni are well prepared for their present cl'\reers.
-13-
Machiavelli e ii Machiavellismo tra la Storia la Politica
by
FRANK J. COPPA, History
CI SONO due uomini che sono importantissimi nella
storia moderna e per il futuro della civilta' del
mondo-questi due sono Italiani, cioe' Galileo Galilei e
Niccolo' Machiavelli. II Galilei con la sua nuova fisica ed
il Machiavelli con la sua nuova scienza politica sono i
primi a dimostrarci l'essenza de! pensiero del mondo mod­erno.
Adesso vorrei considerare II Machiavelli ed il suo
capolavoro, IL Principe.
La figura del Machiavelli e' molto paradossale. Da un
lato si vede che Machiavelli e stato sotto sospetto dal
tempo che scrisse il suo libro. Infatti hanno dato il suo
primo nome, Niccolo' al diavolo-Old Nick-e dal suo
cognome hanno fatto una parola-macchiavellian-che
vuol dire, furbo e scaltro. Dal l'altro lato molte persone
importanti hanno chiamato Machiavelli il padre della
scienza politica. Quali hanno ragione?
Quei che lodano Machiavelli dicono che egli fu onestis­imo
nella sua vita privata ed infatti non fu machiavellico.
In questo la storia insegna che hanno ragione. Ma questi
non possono negare che lui insegna che molto spesso i
principi che usano astuzia ed insincerita' superanno quei
che camminano con lealta' Cosi egli dice:
Quanto sia laudabile in uno principe mantenere la fede e
vivere con integrita' e non con astuzia, ciascuno lo in­tende:
nondimanco si vede per esperienza ne' nostri
tempi quelli principi avere fatto gran cose, che della
fede hanno tenuto poco conto, e che hanno saputo con
l'astuzia aggirare e' cervelli delgi uomini; e alla fine
hanno superato quelli che ci sono fondati in sulla lealta'
Dovete adunque sapere come sono dua generazioni di
combattere:
l'uno con le leggi, l'altro con la forza: quel primo e'
proprio dello uomo, quel secondo e' delle bestie; ma
perche' ii primo molte volte non basta, conviene ricor­rere
al secondo. Pertanto a uno principe e' necessario
sapere bene usare la bestia e l'uomo.
I seguitori di Machiavelli ammetono che ii loro maestro
avissa i princii di essere mezz' uomo e mezza bestia, di
essere la volpe ed il leone alla stessa volta. Ma questi
aggiunono che questo non si puo colpire. Per loro I l Prin­cipe
e' un libro tecnico - che insegna come un capo di
stato puo' mantenere ii suo potere - e non si puo' giudi­care
sul piano morale. Credono che la politica e la mor­alita'
siano cose diverse e non si devono mischiare.
Penso che sia proprio qui che i lodatori di Machiavelli
si sbagliano. Nella cultura classica-e sopratutto negli
scritti del Filosofo, cioe' Aristotle-come nella tradizione
cristiano, qui si puo pensare di Santo Tommaso, la politica
non era disticcata della moralita'. Infatti politica e mora­lita',
politica e la questione della fine del uomo erano
intimamente legato.
In questa tradizione 1a politica e lo stato erano impor­tanti
non per se stessi, ma perche' conducevano l'uomo al
buono. II buon per gli uomini era definita come una vita in
linea con I'essenza, cioe' aniamale razionale. La politica
doveva aiutare l'uomo a sviluparsi come uomo, una crea­tura
razionale dove la ragione manteneva gli appetiti a
posto e cosi aiutavo l'uomo e l'umanita'
II Machiavelli, pero', va contra tutta questa tradizione.
Con lui lo stato esiste per se' o per il suo principe.
E gli uomini in universali, iudicano piu' agli occhi che
alle mani ; perche' tocca a vedere a ognuno, a sentire a
pochi. Ognuno vede quello che tu pari, pochi sentono
quello che tu se'; e quelli pochi non ardiscano opporsi
alla opinione di molti, che abbino la maesta' dello stato
che Ii difenda; e nelle azioni di tutti gli uomini, e massime
de' principi , dove non e' iudizio a chi reclamare, si guarda
al fine. Facci dunque uno principe di vincere e mantenere
Jo stato: e' mezzi saranno sempre iudicati onorevoli e da
ciascuno laudati; perche' ii vulgo ne va sempre preso
con quello che pare e con lo evento della cosa; e nel
mondo non e' se non vulgo; e li pochi non hanno luogo,
quando li assai hanno dove appoggiarsi.
Allora la cosa piu' importante non e' piu' che il principe
aiuti ii popolo nel suo sviluppo verso ii buono, ma che
egli mantena il suo potere come capo di stato-esistenza.
Con Machiavelli lo stato e' troncato, non ha piu' fine o
scopo nel senso classico - ed infatti e' soggetto ai capricci
del principe. Questo e la contribuzione di Machiavelli che
rimane con noi sino ad oggi. Infatti uno scienzato della
politica Ernest Cassirer ha osservato che nel ventesimo
secolo quando mito e magia sono stato scacciati fuori dai
tanti ambienti, sono entrati nel piu' importante, la politica.
E' vero che nel Discorso su Livy vedremo che Machia­velli
si mostra un nationalista italiano. Ma su per giu' il
nazionalismo e in fondo un altra forma di misticismo­che
molto spesso va contra la ragione, contra il buon
senso, contra la giustizia. II Mazzini, pertanto nazional­ista,
era un uomo della vecchia e non della nuova cor­rente.
Se voi leggete ii suo Dovere dei Uomini vedete che
Mazzini era molto religioso e per lui la N azione-ed in­fatti
ogni nazione-era il veicolo per salvare l'umanita­non
era come nel nuovo nazionalismo una fine per se'.
Percio' egli pensava non solo di "Giovane Italia" ma
anche per "Giovane Europa" e percio' non ha potuto
accettare ii lavoro di Cavour, chi era un uomo del nuovo
pensiero, che infatti ha detto "se avessi fatto per me quello
che ho fatto per l'Italia, sarei stato maledetto." II Federico
Sclopis gli risponse giustamente, 'della moralita' ce n'e
una.
Nel nome del nuovo misticismo, e il pensiero che il fine
giustifica i mezzi son state fatte tante ingiustizie. Pensate
a Bismarck, un Kaiser Wilhelm, un Mussolini, e piu' peg­gio-
un Hitler. Quando si crede che tutto sia valevole,
che tutto sia relativo, che nella politica non c'e' moralita'
ne fine, siamo nel misticisimo che ci porta al fascismo.
E' verissimo che primo di Machiavelli non tutti i prin­cipi
erano buoni, tutt' aitro. Pero' camminavano nel vec­chio
sistema di moralita' e sapevano che quando facevano
violenze, cose criminali contro ii popolo a le legge, pecca­vano.
Dope Machiavelli proprio questo sistema di etica fu
distrutto. Tl principe di Machiavelli sapeva quando pec­cava,
i moderni, grazie a Machiavelli, non sanno nem­meno
questo, Nel mondo moderno non ci sono piu' pec­cati,
solo sbagli.
-14-
Copernicus, Hooke, and Simplicity
by
F. F. CENTORE, Philosophy
DOES THE sun travel around the earth or does the
earth travel around the sun? The limited objective of
this paper is to see how one noted seventeenth century
thinker, writing on th~ topic previous to the publication
of Newton's Principia, answered this question and why
he gave the answer that he did. Our procedure will be to
set out the views of Copernicus' important predecessors,
that of Copernicus himself, and that of Hooke, and then
to place these views in their wider historical context.
In the history of Western thought, various thinkers, for
a number of reasons, have supported one side or the other
of the question above. Aristarchus of Samos ( c.310-230
B.C.), for instance, a pupil of Strato of Lampsacus ( who
followed Theophrastus as head of the Aristotelian school),
is reported to have maintained the heliocentric theory. 1
Exactly why Aristarchus held such a view, however, is not
revealed. One might conjecture, that it may have presented
itself to him as a compromise position between the later
Pythagorean view, i.e. that the sun, moon, and earth mov­ed
around some central fire, and the Aristotelian view, of
an immobile earth in the center of a series of moving con­centric
spheres.
On the other hand, another well-known figure in the
Hellenic tradition, Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria (fl.c.
150 A.D.) , based his system of the universe on the terra­centric
theory. His reasons for taking this view are stated,
some explicitly, some implicitly, at the beginning of his
Almagest.2 First of all, to suppose that the earth moves
at all goes against our experience. Although, as he admits,
it would be much simpler to suppose that the earth turned
once in twenty-four hours rather than the whole heavens,
to support such a proposition one would have to observe
the earth moving out from underneath anything thrown
up into the air. Furthermore, given the great speed with
which the earth must move in order to complete its rota­tion
in twenty-four hours, one should be able to see any
such object, as well as things already floating in air (such
as clouds), moving very quickly to the west. This is not
observed. If someone should say that the air is jelly-like
thus holding things in place, then, thought Ptolemy, ob­jects
tossed into the air would not come down at all.
As far as the heliocentric theory itself was concerned,
Ptolemy knew two things. First, a necessary consequence
of such a view would be the discovery, however slight, f
an angle of parallax of at least one of the fixed stars.
Secondly, he knew that such an angle had never been
observed. Therefore, even though the heliocentric theory
would simplify astronomy, it could not be accepted a-s
factually true. Consequently, Ptolemy set out to "save the
appearances" based upon the geocentric view. He did this
by employing only the perfect circles demanded by the
perfect heavens of Greek thought, even though the actual
paths of some celestial bodies were not perfect circles.
This much was true of Copernicus also. However, Ptolemy
did something else. He used "equant points." Such a
point is off-center. And, even though the body goes around
its actual center of rotation, its motion is not uniform with
respect to that center but to the equant point. This means,
in effect, that there are two circles, only one of which can
claim regular or uniform angular velocity. This was some­thing
Copernicus could not accept.
Although questioned by some thinkers between the
time of Ptolemy and the time of Copernicus, the geocentric
view was never effectively denied in public until Coperni­cus
did so in his work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coeles­tium,
published in 1543, the year of his death. Copernicus
claimed to have come upon his basic notion about 1506,
and about 1530 he wrote a brief sketch of his views, De
hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se constitutis commen­tariolus,
which was circulated privately among his friends.
Sometime later, G. J. Rheticus, after spending ab:mt a
year studying with Copernicus, in 1540 published De libris
revolutionum copernici narratio prima on the new system.
It is in his main work, however, that Copernicus himself
tells us why he accepted the heliocentric theory and an­swers
objections against it.
Uniformity and Circularity
Copernicus stated in his own preface to his main work
that the concentric spheres theory failed to conform to
the facts to such a great extent that it could not be accep­ted.
Ptolemy's system also had to be rejected - not be­cause
it diverged greatly from the observed appearances,
because it did in fact account fairly well for the facts; but
because it violated an ancient principle of explanation,
namely, that all heavenly motions must be uniform as well
as in perfect circles. As Copernicus put it, "Although those
who have invented eccentrics have been able for the most
p;1rt to predict the observed motions in a numerical way,
they have in so doing allowed many things which contra­dict
the first principles of the regularity of motions," i.e.,
the motions were not always uniform with respect to their
actual centers of rotation. 3
In chapter 4 of book I of his Revolutions, Copernicus
tells us why the motions must be uniform and circular.
First of all, in order for the bodies to keep returning to
the same place, they must ride some closed figure . Next,
in the perfect heavens these figures must also be perfect,
i.e., circles. Now, what could cause an irregularity in such
motions? Only some change in the internal or external
natural or supernatural forces on them or some change in
the nature of the bodies. But Copernicus could imagine
no such natural forces or changes in nature, and God had
no reason for changing things. Therefore, to allow into
one's system, as Ptolemy had done, a lack of uniformity
of motions was absurd.
Copernicus answered the standard objections to the
concept of an earth that moves both daily and yearly by
claiming that bodies had a certain kinship with the earth4
and that the area of the fixed stars was almost an infinite
distance away from the earth.5 In other words, there was
some kind of natural tendency for bodies removed from
the earth's surface to continue moving around with that
surface and, with respect to the lack of any observation of
-15-
an angle of parallax for some star, Copernicus was
claiming that there was in fact such an angle but that
it was too slight to be seen by anyone. Rather than use
the facts of experience to prove his theory, he used his
theory to prove another theory ("kinship") and establish
a fact. Neither answer proved his theory; but then Coper­nicus
did not expect them to do so. What really convinced
· him was the greater " beauty" of his system because of the
way in which it conformed to the ancient norms of perfect
circularity.
During the ensuing century, the intellectual atmosphere
in Europe was to change. 6 By the 1650's, one could no
longer argue on the basis of a priori suppositions, such as
the perfection of the heavens relative to the sub-lunar
regions and the need for motions in perfect circles in the
perfect heavens. Although not the first to hold such a view,
Galileo, who based his case upon strong circumstantial
evidence which he had himself uncovered, denied the
disunity of the super-and sub-lunar regions. And, although
his work did not prove the heliocentric theory, by weaken­ing
the ancient disunity view of nature, it did tend also to
weaken another ancient and widely held view, the geo­centric
theory.
Furthermore, Brahe's observations and Kepler's calcula­tions
had convinced many intellectuals that in truth the
planets travelled in elliptical orbits rather than circular
ones. Such noncircular orbits did away with the need for
epicycles. This, in a way, was a simplification in that it
reduced the number of independent motions needed to
"save the phenomena." 7 Copernicus had done the same
type of thing when he removed the need for equants by
his reintroduction of the heliocentric view.
Hooke's Rationale
What then would induce a natural philosopher in the
seventeenth century to accept the heliocentric theory when,
in the face of what could easily be observed, the prima
f acie evidence was certainly opposed to the idea that the
earth turned on its axis or went around the sun? No longer
was there any need to demand that bodies move uniformly
along perfect circles and hence champion Copernicus over
Ptolemy. Why then not go by the brute facts of experience?
With respect to the diurnal motion of the earth, clouds
are not seen racing to the west and objects thrown up do
come down more or less over the same spot. 8 With respect
to the yearly motion of the earth, in the early seventeenth
century even the best astronomers could not find an angle
of parallax for a star, and even the most ignorant of men
could see that the sun was moving and not the earth.
Among the outstanding scientists who believed in the
heliocentric theory was Robert Hooke (1635-1703) .9 The
son of a lower middle-class family, Hooke found his way
to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he became an
assistant to Boyle. Through Boyle's influence, he was
appointed Curator of Experiments to the newly formed
Royal Society of London, a post which he held from 1663
until his death. In 1665, he published his Micrographia,
a work which immediately made him famous throughout
Europe. The rest of his life was spent in the pursuit of a
deeper and more accurate knowledge of nature than any­one
before him could boast of having. A fertile and ima­ginative
mind, combined with a lust for knowledge via
experimentation, made Hooke one of the most respected
thinkers in the seventeenth century. His high reputation,
however, did not prevent him from becoming involved in
various controversies. He argued with Hevelius over the
value of telescopic sights on astronomical instruments;
with Huygens over who invented the spring-driven pocket
watch; and with Newton over the nature of light and the
discovery of the law of universal gravitation.
Basically, Robert Hooke was not a contentious person.
Nevertheless, he did regard himself as an original and
independent thinker who ought not to be shunned or be­littled
by his contemporaries, even those with well-esta­blished
reputations. One should not be surprised, then, to
note a deliberate attempt on Hooke's part to be indepen­dent
of past and present contributors to natural philosophy.
To affirm that Hooke endeavored to analyze carefully
and follow up the work of those with whom he came in
contact and who, from the vantage point of the twentieth
century are considered to have been the outstanding
thinkers of the time, would be historically inaccurate. So
we find, for example, Hooke early in his career climbing
to the top of St. Paul's Cathedral in London to test for
himself the rate of fall of free falling bodies and to test a
"Torricellian device." 10 Later in life, after having given
up the Cartesian cosmology, we find him criticizing a whole
series of astronomical chimeras and theories, such as
"Mundane Vortices," the four Aristotelian elements, solid
orbs, and "Sympathy and Antipathy," which he claimed
to have exploded through his own personal observations.
In the interim, while letters and travellers passed back
and forth across the Channel bearing information, he man­aged
to brush aside the Italians, criticize the Germans,
and submit the Dutch to a re-evaluation. When asked, for
instance, by the Royal Society to report on a book of
experiments written by L. Magalotti and entitled Accade­mia
del Cimento, Hooke reported in March, 1668, that
there was nothing in it that had not been done better in
England. Three years later, before the same group, Hooke
rejected two works by Leibnitz as being erroneous." 11
Furthermore, on numerous occasions he repeated experi­ments
reported to him by Leeuwenhoek, for whom he
otherwise had the greatest respect and admiration as a
worker in natural philosophy. "Autopsia" is necessary to
discovery, he stated categorically; 12 and he warned his
contemporaries not to accept the results of others which
in the past have proved so replete with repetitions and
errors.
Convictions Strongly Felt
A good indication of how strongly the Curator felt
about the "mythologies" of the past (and the present)
can be gleaned from his mature work, "A Discourse of the
Nature of Comets. Read at the Meetings of the Royal
Society, soon after Michaelmas, 1682." 1 3 He begins his
treatise by carefully relating all the facts and data con­cerning
comets as he himself knew them. After this, he
states his own view on the nature of comets, namely, that
they are solid bodies set afire by friction with the ether.
They can burn because the air, which is necessary for com­bustion,
extends a vast distance above the earth. Such a
view, he claims, explains all the facts. But what of other
views attempting to explain the comet? "Those that hold
-16-
solid Orbs," he continued, "will afford it no room, nor
those that hold Vortices. Those indeed that suppose
Demons, may suppose what they will, but to little pur­pose."
14
Hooke returns again and again to his attack on the
mythologizers. In the same treatise, although it is not part
of the title, he also discusses gravity. Again, he gives the
facts and then turns to possible explanations. Some, he
declares, say it is due to a spirit or a hylarchick spirit
[H. More]; others attribute it to an innate quality or in­herent
tendency for dregs to fall to the lowest place in the
universe [Aristotle]; others say it is a power of the ether
which rotates and causes heavy bodies to move toward the
center [Descartes], still others say that the earth is a
magnet which sends out chains of hooked particles that
drag bodies down [Gilbert], "And many other such Fic­tions
and Chimeras, which serve only to inform us what
kind of Notions and Imaginations those Men had in their
own Minds." 1 5
He later turned his attention to various views on the
motions of planets. ·As a part of his exposition, he dis­carded
all explanations based upon spirits or intelligences,
solid orbs, epicycles and other "wheel-work," magnetism,
friendly and enemy sides, a real moon inside a visible
shell, radiating spokes and light rays, and whirling ethereal
vortices. These, he said, were all "nonsense." 1 6
The foregoing remarks should be interpreted neither as
an implication on Hooke's part of a priori disrespect for
his predecessors or contemporaries nor as a disparagement
of group action as an important aspect of the search for
truth. This latter can easily be seen to be not the case by
observing the effort Hooke poured into working for and
strengthening the Royal Society. Rather than an a priori
disrespect, it would seem that Hooke cultivated an a pos­teriori
disappointment in some of the accomplishments
and methods of others after witnessing the many differ­ences
between his conclusions and theirs. The fact that,
from the beginning of his career, he believed others to be
purloining the fruits of his labors only served to reinforce
his cautiousness. The net result of this combination of
Hooke's personality, experiences, and circumstances was
a strong tendency on his part largely to ignore the work
of others after having superficially noted their claims,
thereby leaving himself free to operate on his own, unen­cumbered
by erroneous, prejudiced, and, sometimes, wild
doctrines.
However, true though the above statements may be,
there does not seem to have been any time in Hooke's
mature life when he was not a Copernican. Moreove
Hooke did not look upon the heliocentric theory merely
as a mathematical convenience for "saving the appear­ances."
For him, the earth really and physically circum­vented
the sun. Why was this?
More than likely, Hooke's faith in the Copernican sys­tem
was derived both from Galileo's observations, which
tended to break down the dichotomy between the celestial
and terrestrial regions of the universe, and from Descartes,
a Copernican whose mechanistic philosophy of matter in
motion was highly regarded by Hooke. However, what
seemed to have influenced Hooke the most was the sim­plicity
of the heliocentric theory. Hooke complained that
everyone had his own view on the nature of the celestial
motions, each of which appeared to be more complicated
and encumbered than the next. This state of affairs, claim­ed
the Curator,
is the reason why the Copernican has obtained with all
the modern and best Astronomers, against all the others,
as being the most simple, and the least incumber'd of
any; especially as it is improved by the Incomparable
Kepler. All the Reason of which is from this Maxim,
that Natura nihil egit frustra, sed frustra fit per plura
quod fieri potest per pauciora. 1 7
In a similar vein, Hooke asserts that, contrary to the
hypotheses of many of his predecessors and contempor­aries,
his hypotheses concerning comets and gravitation
did not invent anything new in nature; his arguments are
simple. He states for the reader five points which sum­marize
the virtues of his approach to reality:
In the first place, he supposes nothing which is absurd
or which cannot be proved either directly by observation
or indirectly by analogy. Second, he limits himself to the
simplest principles and does not multiply causes unneces­sarily.
Third, according to his list, Hooke states that he
realizes the need to affirm the uniformity of nature if one
is to have a trustworthy natural philosophy. "That Nature
seems to take similar Ways for producing similar Effects"
is clear to Hooke. In the fourth place, there is nothing to
contradict his position, and the hypotheses he enunciates
can be seen operating more or less in all bodies. Finally,
on the basis of the most "easy principles of Body and
Motion," he can completely explain all the appearances
of nature. Hooke had no use for confused and involved
methods and doctrines. 1 8
Defense of Copernicus
In order to vindicate Copernicus once and for all,
he hoped to find what no one else had been able to
find: an angle of parallax for some star. This was the
subject of the first of his Cutlerian Lectures, entitled "An
attempt to prove the Annual Motion of the Earth, by
Observations made with accurate Instruments: wherein
is shown the Impossibility of doing it, by the most exact
Instruments and ways used by preceding Astronomers.
The Instruments and method used in these Observations :
The way of seeing the fixed Stars in the Daytime; and a
new Hypothesis for solving the motions of the Heavenly
Bodies is hinted," originally written and read in 1670 but
not published until 1674. 19
By the use of a telescope which was perpendicular to
the surface of the earth and which he had set up in his
chambers in Gresham College, the London home of the
Royal Society, Hooke claimed to have discovered an
angle of parallax of a bright star in the head of the
Dragon. Since the "more knowing and judicious" thinkers
of his time who were adhering to the Copernican hypo­thesis
for "many plausible reasons" were then in the
minority owing to the ignorance or prejudice of most
others, it was necessary for someone to deliver a smashing
blow against the majority in order finally to resolve the
situation. Such was the group of parallax observations
which he called an experimentum crucis. It is generally
agreed today that the aim of Hooke's "Archimedean En­gine
that was to move the Earth" was right in principle
but wrong in execution in his case. 20
-17-
One sees here what seems to be an unique case with
respect to Hooke's attitude toward the nonconfirmatory
results of some of his experiments. In 1670, we find him
saying beforehand what he will say if his experiment did
not show the anticipated results. He remarks, at the begin­ning,
that many learned people do not admit the Coperni­can
theory. Some, such as the Jesuit astronomer Riccioli,
even go so far as to give all sorts of arguments against the
heliocentric hypothesis. Nonetheless, claims Hooke, his
observations will answer all and every objection both
old and new. And, even if he should fail to find an
angle of parallax for some star, he would maintain his
belief in Copernicus' essential correctness by affirming the
almost infinite extension of the universe. This disclosure
is all the more remarkable when we note that in the same
part of the same work he called his parallax observations
an experimentum crucis.
Hooke and His Contemporaries
There are two points to be gleaned from the above
observations on Hooke. The first is his categorical rejec­tion
of any explanation which did not agree with the facts
or which partook of an anthropomorphic,'mythological, or
deus ex machina approach to natural philosophy. This
meant that Hooke had to reject much of what had been
said by his predecessors and what was being said by his
contemporaries. The second point is Hooke's categorical
devotion to the Copernican theory as modified by Kepler
so as to eliminate epicycles and other "wheel-work." This
devotion was based upon two factors. One was that the
newer system did not depend upon any of the antiquated
outlooks which he thought to be foolish. The other was the
beautiful simplicity of its construction.21 It was, he thought,
physically speaking the most simple yet adequate system
among all those systems currently competing for accep­tance.
These two factors taken conjointly seem to supply
a sufficient and adequate explanation of why Hooke accep­ted
the heliocentric theory.
Hooke's thinking represents quite a change from that
of Aristarchus, Ptolemy, and Copernicus. Hooke was a
new man looking at a new world through the modern
eyes of an up-to-date seventeenth century natural philoso­pher.
22 The older criteria of acceptability, which demanded
that celestial motions be explained by perfect circles, either
singly or in combination, in conformity with the observed
phenomena, was now replaced by a new set of intellectual
demands, namely, that to be acceptable the celestial theory
must be in conformity with the facts of experience, as sim­ple
as possible, and must not contain any mythological
overtones. The theories of Ptolemy and Brahe could satisfy
the first requirement but not the other two. The Curator
found, though, that the heliocentric theory, employing
single elliptical paths for each body, measured up to this
standard. Consequently, he was ready to defend its fact-uality
to the utmost of his ability. To Hooke's mind, reason
had finally triumphed over mythology.
But had it?
There is, of course, something at work here which is
more than pure inductive science. Hooke's acceptance of
the heliocentric view depended on principles which could
not be proved inductively, especially the principle of sim­plicity.
In this instance, a scientific conclusion was based
upon a philosophical premise. But is this not what Coper­nicus
had done? Instead of demanding perfect circles,
Hooke demanded simplicity - but neither of these re­quirements
is demanded by inductive science.
Let us use an example given by Duhem to illustrate our
point. Imagine, suggests Duhem, a situation in which one
scientist, such as Biot defending the particle theory of
light, chooses to defend some older theory by adding to it
a long series of corrections and accessory hypotheses, while
another scientist, such as Fresnel defending the wave
theory of light, decided to overthrow completely the older
theory in favor of some basically new one. Who is right?
Are we quickly to abandon some ancient and carefully
constructed wor of human thought when it is possible
to bring it into accord with new data by various modifica­tions?
" On the other hand, it may be that we may find it
childish and unreasonable for the physicist to maintain
obstinately at any cost, at the price of continual repairs
and many tangled-up stays, the worm-eaten columns of a
building tottering in every part, when by razing these
columns it would be possible to construct a simple,
elegant, and solid system. "93
Clearly, Hooke chose the latter alternative. A new
simple theory was better than an old patched up one. But
can one say, as Hooke seems to have, that this was
obviously the only right thing to do? Cannot the demand
for simplicity in one's analysis of celestial mechanics be
considered as much a mythology as the demand for per­fect
circles in a perfect heaven?
Certain parallels to the above situation, drawn from
the history of science, immediately come to mind. Hooke,
like many others, accepted the existence of the all-perva­sive
ether and "mixture theory" of air as accurate state­ments
of the facts. 24 The existence of "phlogiston" was
considered a certainty for many years. The fluid theory
of heat, which regarded heat not as the motion of a body's
internal parts but as a substance, called "caloric," which
flowed through the hot body, was widely held for a number
of years. 25 Such views are no longer considered acceptable,
and those who held them are considered to have been a
little foolish in that regard. Yet the reason for their accep­tability
at the time was basically the same as that for the
acceptance of the Copernican hypothesis by Hooke in the
seventeenth century.
Such views did not depend upon "antiquated" notions,
and they were simple. They fulfilled a certain intellectual
demand which said "be new" and "explain the facts by
the simplest hypothesis available." Yet they were wrong.
No one, however, thinks Hooke foolish for siding with
Copernicus in 1670 in spite of the prima f acie evidence.
Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from this episode
in the history of Western thought. Perhaps we can say
with the French : Rien ne reussit comme le succes.
NOTES
1 Heath states: 'There is not the slightest doubt Aristarchus was
the first to put forward the heliocentric hypothesis. Ancient
testimony is unanimous on this point, and the first witness is
Archimedes, who was a younger contemporary of Aristar­chus,
so there is no possibility of a mistake. Copernicus him­self
admitted that the theory was attributed to Aristarchus,
though this does not seem to be generally known." See T . L.
Heath, A ristarc/111s of Sa mos ( Oxford, England, 1913) , p. 30 I.
-18-
See also T. L. Heath (ed.), The Works of A rchimedes (Cam­bridge,
England, 1912) , p. 222.
2 See The A Images/ (tr. by R. Taliaferro), Great Books of the
Western World (Chicago, 1952) , Vol. XVI, pp. 9ff.
3 Cf. 011 the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (tr. by C. G.
Wallis), Great Books of the Wes/em World (Chicago, 1952) ,
Vol. XVI, pp. 507-508.
4 Ibid. , p. 519.
5 I bid., pp. 516ff.
6 For the details of this development see J. L. E. Dreyer, A
History of Astronomy from Thales 10 Kepler (New York,
1953), chs. 14, 15. Some have claimed that Copernicus' view
was based upon an induction. See B. Ginzburg, "The Scientific
Value of the Copernican Induction," Osiris, Vol. I ( 1936), pp.
308-12. Others have claimed that it was dictated by his desire
for a simpler system. See E . A. Burtt, The Metaphysical
Foundations of Modem Physical Science (2nd. ed., Garden
City, N. Y., 1932) , p. 38 and J. H. Randall, The Making of
the Modern Mind (New York, 1954), p. 229. Neither claim is
historically accurate. E. J. Dijksterhuis has recently stated the
true situ ation when he noted that "when at the end of his
years he reviewed his life 's work once more, he considered the
greatest gain it had brought astronomy was not the changed
position of the sun in the universe and the resulting simplifica­tion
of the world picture, but the abolition of the punctum
aequans, the atonement for the sin against the spirit of Platonic
philorn phy which Ptolemy had committed in an evil hour."
The Mechanization of the World Picture (tr. by C. Dikshoorn,
Oxford, England, 1961 ), pp. 288-289.
7 That Copernicus' system was actually mathematicall y simpler
than Ptolemy's has been disputed. See D. Price, "Contra-Coper­nicus:
A Critical Re-estimation of the Mathematical Planetary
Theory of Ptolemy," Critical Problems in the History of
Science (ed. by M. Clagett, Madison, Wisconsin, 1959) , pp.
197-218.
8 Various attempts to contradict this claim , by showing that
bodies ac tually do not fall back to the same spot, were per­formed
from time to time. Those attempts carried out by the
Accademia de! Cimento, even though inconclusive, received the
widest attention. See Lorenzo Magalotti, Essay es of Natural
Experiments made in the Accademie def Cimento (tr. by R.
Waller, London, 1684) , pp. 143ff. The work was first pub­lished
at Florence in 1666. In Engl and, Hooke led the way in
this effo rt. In 1679 and 1680 he claimed to have found that
dropped bodies fell a half-inch to the S. S. E. of perpendicul ar.
See A. Armitage, "The Deviation of Falling Bodies," Annals
of Science, Vol. 5 (1941-1947) , pp. 342-351 for an outline of
the history of the problem .
9 For the details of Hooke's life see Waller's Introduction to his
edition of The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke (London,
1705) , J. Ward's Lives of the Professors of Gresham College
(London, 1740) , and J. Aubrey's Brief Lives, Chiefly of Con­temporaries,
set down by John A ubrey, between the years
1669 and 1696 (ed. by A. Clark , 2 vols., Oxford, England,
1898) . For a sympathetic treatment of Hooke's personality
see M. 'Espinasse, Robert Hooke (London, 1956).
10 See R. W. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford (Oxford ,
England, 1930) , Vol. 6, 8/ 3, 9/7, and 9/ 15 for the year 1664.
See also a letter from Hooke to Boyle dated I 0/ 6/ 1664.
1 1 ibid., Vol. VI, 5/ 11 and 5/ 25 / 167 1.
12 ibid., Vol. VII, 2/ 1692.
l3 See The Posthumous Works of Rob Jr/ Hooke (ed. by R. Wal-ler,
London, 1705) , pp. J 49ff.
14 Ibid., p. 167
15 Ibid. , p. 177.
16 Ibid. , p. 178.
17 Ibid., p. 167. Note that in 1682 Hooke did not cite his 1670
observations, to be mentioned shortly, in vindication of Coper­nicus.
18 I bid., p. 179. The first four are Hooke's rules for philosophiz­ing.
Note the close resemblance between those and the four
rules Newton later stated at the beginning of book 3 in his
Principia; namely, (1) the need for simplicity, (2) the causal
uniformity and (3) physical uniformity of nature, and (4) one
must not substitute a priori hypotheses for the facts. Hooke's
An Existentialist Variation on G. M. Hopkins'
"Spring and Fall: To a Young Child"
Margaret, why are you weeping
At the sight of trees unleafing?
What do you see
A mid all that debris
Which darkens the skies,
Which so gently, without protest,
Drifts earthward, dies,
That causes your young heart to lie
So heavy inside your breast,
That makes you cry?
ls it that you know too well,
At your young age can you tell,
That this falling, shaded crown
Which buries your feet upon the ground,
Portends our earthly destiny?
Do you see here you and me?
Do these unhinged signs of decay
Make you pause - point the way
To some, not distant, time
When your life, and mine,
Will share a leafbed,
All dead?
ls it some grey fear that's keeping
Your eyes so tearful?
Margaret, n6w so beautiful,
ls it for yourself you're weeping?
- F. F. CENTORE
fifth point is an affirmation of his agreement with Descartes'
basic mechanistic outlook rather than a rule for reasoning in
philosophy.
19 This lecture is reproduced in Gunther, op. cit. (Oxford, Eng­land,
1931) , Vol. 8, Lecture I, pp. 1-28.
20 The exact star Hooke had in view is Y Draconi s. However, on
the basis of modern astronomy, his efforts were not a success.
Hooke claimed to have found what, accord ing to modern
standards, was a fantastically large parallactic angle of 27 or
30 seconds. The first trustworthy determination is attributed
to F. W. Bessel ( l 784-1846) who in 1838 at Koenigsberg
asce rtained a parallax for 61 Cygni of .31 seconds. Today
the absolute parallax of 61 Cygni is given as .294 seconds,
while our nearest star neighbor, and consequently the one with
the greatest angle of parallax, is Alpha Centauri with a read­ing
of .761 seconds of arc. See R. H. Baker, Astronomy (7 th
ed. New York, 1959) , ch. 11.
2 1 See note 7 su pra.
22 In this respect Hooke was representative of bis age. See L.
Thorndike, "Newness and Novelty in Seventeenth-Century
Science and Medicine," R oots of Scientific Thought (ed. by
P. P. Wiener and A. Noland, New York, 1957), pp. 443-457.
23 P. M. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory
(tr. by P. P. Wiener, New York, 1962), p. 217. Duhem de­cided
that "good sense" was the final arbiter in such cases.
When the case for particles became too encumbered and
complicated in the estimation of most reputable scientists of
the time, Biot had the "good sense" to abandon it, even though
"pure logic" would not have demanded that he do so.
24 See E. T. Whittaker, A History of the Theories of Aether and
E lectricity (Edinburgh, 1951) , Vol. I, ch. 1; and M. Boas,
Robert Boyle and Seve11teenth-Century Chemistry (Cambridge,
England, 1958), ch. 6.
2 5 See H·. T. Pledge, Science Since 1500 (New York, 1959) , pp.
109ff.
-19-
. . .. : .. · ·. : . -: . --~.,.. ·. '. . :. . . . .
. .
. . . -
ASIAN STUDIES CENTER: Dr. Paul
K. T. Sih, Director of the Center,
served as co-ordinator of the morning
session of the Conference on Chinese
Culture on March 9 at the Hotel Stat­ler
Hilton. Also participating in the
program of the conference, which was
sponsored by the Institute of Chinese
Culture, were Sister Virginia Therese,
N.M., of the faculty of the Center, and
Miss Corita Kong, a doctoral candi­date
in the Center and member of the
faculty of Suffolk Community College.
Dr. Sih also addressed the Chinese
Center on Long Island at Hempstead
on March 15, when his topic was "The
Merging of East and West." His article
"The Adamant Adversary" recently
appeared in the Winter 1967-68 issue
of Modern Age.
Sister Virginia Therese presented a
number of illustrated lectures on China
and Japan to more than 1,200 fresh­man
high school students in two high
schools-Holy Family in Huntington,
L.I., and Bishop Ford in Brooklyn.
The lectures served as an introduction
to the freshman year Area Studies in
Asia now required by the State of New
York.
Sister Virginia Therese also was
asked to deliver a series of four lec­tures
on Asian religions as part of the
offerings of the Borromean Institute
of Christian Studies sponsored by St.
Charles Borromeo parish in Brooklyn
Heights. The lectures were scheduled
for Tuesday evenings between Febru­ary
27 and April 2. She has also pub­lished
a number of book reviews in
the Fall and Winter issues of World
Mission magazine. Her essay, "Old
and New Political Institutions of Ja­pan,"
is scheduled for the next issue
of China Academy, a journal of politi­cal
science published in Taiwan. She
also participated as a panel speaker at
the three-day conference held by the
Society for the Propagation of the
Faith in the Diocese of Rockville Cen­ter
March 21-23. The conference was
held in Huntington, L. I.
CLASSICAL LANGUAGES: Dr. An­na
Lydia Motto's paper, "Paradoxum
Senecae; The Epicurean Stoic," which
she read at the meeting of the Classical
Association of the Atlantic States in
November, 1967, is appearing in the
April issue of The Classical World.
She plans to conduct research during
the coming summer as basis for a cri­tical
bibliographic survey, "A Decade
of Senecan Scholarship (1958-68) ,"
which is to be published in the Winter
1968-69 issue of the same journal. ..
ECONOMICS: Dr. C. L. Jain reports
the publication of two recent articles
-Self-Sufficiency in Food: Dream or
Reality," which appeared in the Janu­ary,
1968, issue of India Horizon; and
"The Fundamentals of List Segmental­ism,"
in The Reporter of Direct Mail
Advertising, which he co-authored with
Al Migliaro, in the February, 1968,
issue.
Dr. Simon Lopata was cited by Ye­shiva
University as one of a group of
distinguished lay leaders from all parts
of the United States during the Third
Biennial Torah Leadership Conference
conducted in Long Beach, L. I., Feb­ruary
22-25 . Citations were awarded
for dedicated and meritorious service
to Jewish religious and communal life.
EDUCATION: Miss Ethna Sheehan
reports the publication of a new edition
(with introduction) of The Fairy Ring,
a collection of folk tales originally
compiled early in this century by Kate
Douglas Wiggin and Nora A. Smith.
The 1967 edition was published by
Doubleday. She also served on a spe­cial
committee of the National Con­ference
of Christians and Jews which
prepared a selected and annotated list
of "Books for Brotherhood."
ENGLISH: Dr. Constance Hieatt's
translation of Beowulf and Other Old
English Poems was published since
the last issue of this journal, and her
textbook, Essentials of Old English,
is being released in April.
Dr. Frank Kunkel's article, "Ten­nessee
Williams and the Death of
God," appeared in the February 23
issue of Commonweal.
Dr. Lynn E. Martin has delivered
papers at two recent scholarly meet­ings:
"An Essay in Middle English
Stylistics" at the Tenth International
-20-
Congress of Linguists in Bucharest,
Rumania, August 28 - September 2,
1967; and "Was Richard Beauchamp,
Earl of Warwick, the Model for Sir
Gareth?" at the Mediaeval Institute
held at Western Michigan University
in Kalamazoo, Michigan, March 13-
15. A resume of the former has been
published in Resumes des Communi­cations,
published in Bucharest in
1967; and the full text will appear in
a forthcoming issue of Acta. He is
also currently working with Dr. Con­stance
Hieatt on a Middle English
Anthology, a book of readings with
introductory material designed to aid
both graduate and undergraduate stu­dents
in mastering Middle English. It
will be published by Odyssey Press.
Dr. Elmer A. Ordonez reports that
his article "Notes on the Revisions of
An Outcast of the Islands" has been
accepted for publication in the August
issue of Notes and Queries, a publica­tion
of the Oxford University Press.
The article is part of a book-length
manuscript on the style of Joseph Con­rad
and was for the most part pre­pared
during a year of post-doctoral
research at Oxford University during
academic year 1966-67. The research
was financed by grants from the Rocke­feller
Foundation and the University
of the Philippines.
FINE ARTS: Professor Clyde R. Car­ter
has directed a color television film
in collaboration with the Diocesan
Television Center of the Diocese of
Brooklyn, based on a painting demon­stration
by Professor Edward Manetta.
The film is to be used as part of the
cultural enrichment programs in Cath­olic
high schools of the diocese.
Professor R. G. Meyers, a new
member of the faculty, came to St.
John's this year after obtaining B.A.
and M.Mus. degrees at the University
of Buffalo and Yale University, re­spectively.
Earlier he earned a bach­elor's
degree in mechanical engineering
at the University of Detroit and has
managed to combine these two inte­rests
in his article, "Technical Bases
of Electronic Music," which appeared
in four installments in the Spring and
Winter issues for 1966-67 and 1967-
68 of the Journal of Music Theory.
His composition "Metachromatikos"
for string orchestra was presented at
the November 15 concert in Marillac
Hall. The piece, a one-movement high­ly
chromatic work about 12 minutes
in length, was composed especially for
the concert. Professor Meyers is also
participating in the organization of the
Experimental College at the Brooklyn
Center. He has planned a course that
combines performance, composition,
and the study of electronic music.
Another faculty composer, Dexter
Morrill, recently published seven com­positions
as part of the Contemporary
Music Project of the Music Educators
National Conference. The group in­cludes
a Ballet Suite for Orchestra, a
Divertimento for Band, and several
choral works. Mr. Morrill, a former
Ford Foundation Fellow in composi­tion,
also attended the annual meeting
of MENC in Seattle, Washington,
March 13-17. His particular interest at
this meeting was the Young Compos­ers'
Project.
Two articles by Dr. Alfred Pike
have recently appeared: "A Phenome­nological
Approach to Tonal Imag­ery,"
in the Fall, 1967, issue of the
Journal of Existentialism; and "The
Phenomenological Analysis of Musical
Experience," in the Winter, 1967-68
issue of the Journal of Research in
Music Education.
HISTORY: Dr. Frank J. Coppa, Dr.
Benjamin Bast, Dr. Eugene Kusiele­wicz
and the departmental chairman,
Dr. Walter L. Willigan, attended the
annual meeting of the American His­torical
Association in Toronto, On­tario,
last December. Dr. Coppa also
participated in sessions of the Society
for Italian Studies and of the Catholic
Historical Association, which were
held jointly with the AHA meeting;
and Dr. Kusielewicz chaired the lunch­eon
panel at _the meeting of the Polish
American Historical Association. Sub­ject
of the panel discussion: "Sir Casi­mir
Gzowski and the Development of
Canada."
Dr. Borisz de Balla's essay "A Pro­pos
du 'Sens de l'Histoire' " was pub­lished
in La Pensee Catholique: Cah­iers
de Synthese (Paris, 1967), along
with an announcement by the publish­er
Editions du Cedre of the forthcom-ing
appearance of the book-length
manuscript from which it was ex­tracted.
The work deals with theories
and interpretations of history. Dr. De­Balla
also delivered the principal ad­dress
at the annual meeting of the
American - Hungarian Federation at
Hunter College on March 17, 1968.
Dr. Irving G. Williams reports that
he is working with Dr. Luther Evans
of Columbia University, Dr. Louis W.
Koenig of New York University, and
a number of other educators (including
social studies administrators from the
New York City Board of Education)
in determining policy for the maximum
utilization of the Library of Presiden­tial
Papers in New York City. Present
plans call for the development of a
pilot packet or kit of primary presi­dential
source material on George
Washington, suitable for use on the
high school and college level. Dr. Will­iams
is a member of the National
Board of the Library, at the dedication
of which former President Eisenhower
will preside in May. Dr. Williams' ex­tensive
research and publication on the
topic of the vice presidency was re­cently
cited a dozen times in Paul T.
David's article on the vice presidency
in the November, 1967, issue of the
Journal of Politics.
MODERN FOREIGN LANGUA­GES:
Dr. Edith Braunstein attended
the meeting of the American Associa­tion
of Teachers of French which was
held last December at the French Cul­tural
Embassy in New York City.
Dr. Lena M. Ferrari reports that two
book reviews by her have recently
appeared in the Modern Language
Journal and in Italica.
POLITICAL SCIENCE: Dr. Gerald
E. Fitzgerald has prepared an abstract
of an article, "Yardsticks for Measur-
- 21 -
ing Personnel Department," which ap­pears
in the April issue of the Public
Personnel Review; and an article by
him on Latin American political theory
will appear in the next issue of Latin
America in Review. His book, Con­stitutions
of Latin America, is being
published on April 1 by the Henry
Regnery Company of Chicago.
MARKETING: Prof. Gordon Di Paolo
has been appointed to Governor Rocke­feller's
Regional Advisory Committee
on Statewide Planning For Vocational
Rehabilitation. The Committee, under
the auspices of the State Education
Department, Board of Regents, is con­cerned
with the development of a
program to provide comprehensive
services and facilities in the area of
vocational rehabilitation. He has also
served as a consultant to Dr. John
Fayerweather, Chairman Department
of International Business, New York
University Graduate School of Busi­ness
Administration, in the develop­ment
of a new course in Latin Ameri­can
Business. This course may serve
as a foundation for application to the
planned International Business Pro­gram
at St. John's.
In addition, Prof. Di Paolo partici­pated,
January 27, 1968, in the "Open
House" recruiting program, in the
Brooklyn Center, on a panel discussion
of curriculum offerings and by pre­senting
a "model" class in Marketing.
Eberhard E. Scheuing has published
an article entitled 'The Manager as
the Center of Decision-Making' (Der
Unternehmer als Entscheidungzen­trum)
in the October 1967 issue of
Zeitschrift fur Betriebswirtschaft ( cor­responding
to the Harvard Business
Review) ; published the first two bro­chures
( 8 more to follow) of his cor­respondence
course 'Modern Manage­ment'
(Modeme Unternehmensfiih­rung)
with the Gabler Verlag in Wies­baden,
Germany; published three arti­cles
in the October, November, and
December 1967 issues of the German
trade journal Die Linie dealing with
latest fashion rumors, production meth­ods,
and a glossary of American-Ger­man
terms in the foundation garment
industry; and been granted a leave of
absence for the academic year 1968-
1969 to settle urgent family matters.
PSYCHOLOGY: Dr. Edward T. Clark
reports the recent publication of three
articles: "Sex Differences in the Per-
ception of Academic Achievement a­mong
Elementary School Children" in
the Journal of Psychology, August,
1967; "Peers' Perceptions of Negro
and White Occupational Preferences"
( of which Kenneth F. Misa was co­author)
in the Personnel and Guidance
Journal, November, 1967; and "Com­parison
of Verbal and Non-Verbal
Measures of Self-Concept among Kin­dergarten
Boys and Girls" ( of which
Richard J. Ozehosky was co-author) ,
FUTURE PUBLICATIONS
OFTHE
ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY
PRESS
"Readings in Educational Psychology"
3rd printing (Revised)
Rev. John B. Murray, C.M.
"Studies in Modern History"
Dr. Gaetano Vincitorio
"Business Forecast"
Dean John J. Clark
"The Prose Romances of Edgar A . Poe
Thomas Ollive Mabbott with
Introduction by Dr. G. E. Hatvary
"Vincentian Studies" (Series) No. 1
Rev. Joseph I. Dirvin, C.M.
"The Kuomintang: Selected Historical
Documents, 1894-1965"
Milton J. T. Shieh
All SJU faculty members are entitled
to a complimentary copy of any St.
John's University Press Publication.
ANSWERS
( Quiz on Page 5)
(l) Hamlet.
(2) Romeo and Juliet.
( 3) King Lear.
( 4) Henry IV, Part One.
(5) Titus Andronicus.
(6) Twelfth Night.
(7) All's Well That Ends Well.
( 8) Cymbeline.
(9) Coriolanus.
(10) The Merry Wives of Windsor.
(11) Othello.
(12) Love's Labour's Lost.
(13) Measure for Measure.
(14) Richard Ill.
(15) Antony and Cleopatra.
a paper presented to the Eighth An­nual
Convocation of the Educational
Research Association of New York
State in November, 1967.
Dr. Rocco Martino's article "Spread
Effect as a Function of Intelligence"
appeared in the 1967 edition of Psy­chological
Reports.
SPEECH: Dr. Arthur Eisenstadt has
been re-appointed editor-in-chief of
the Journal of the New Jersey Speech
and Hearing Association for 1968. His
full schedule of recent and forthcoming
speaking engagements includes parti­cipation
in a panel discussion during
"Authors' Night" at Temple Shomrer
Emunah in Montclair, N. J. , on March
8; chairing a panel discussion on
"Speech Correction Techniques" at
the annual meeting of the Speech As­sociation
of the Eastern States on
April 6; moderating a panel of oto­laryngologists
on "Disorders of Voice
and Implications for Speech Pathol­ogy,"
at the annual meeting of the New
York State Speech and Hearing Asso­ciation
on April 24; and participation
in a panel on "Total Rehabilitation­The
Organic Concept" at the annual
meeting of the New Jersey Speech and
Hearing Association on April 25.
THEOLOGY: Rev. Richard Kugel­man,
C.P., is the author of articles
which will appear in forthcoming issues
of two publications: one on the Bible
end ecumenism will appear in the St.
John's University Alumni Magazine;
and another on Our Lady and the
Scriptures will appear in the journal
of the Legion of Mary. In addition,
at the request of the International
Committee on English in the Liturgy,
he prepared a brief on the exegesis of
the Lord's Prayer and the problems
of modern translation of the prayer.
His commentary on the First Epistle
to the Corinthians also will appear in
the soon-to-be-published Jerome Com­mentary;
and book reviews by him
have recently appeared in the Catholic
Biblical Quarterly and Theological
Studies.
On the Thursdays of March, Father
Kugelman presented four lectures on
St. Paul and his theology to the religion
teachers in parochial schools in Kings
County (this in the University's Brook­lyn
Center); he will repeat them in
April and May on the Jamaica campus
for the religion teachers in parochial
-22-
schools in Queens County. Both series
are sponsored by the Diocese of Brook­lyn
in co-operation with St. John's. In
May, he will lecture on Our Lady in
the Scriptures to the Assumption Col­lege
for Sisters in Mendham, N. J.,
and during the summer will teach a
course on the Pentateuch and the
theology of Genesis in the Graduate
School of Religious Education at
Marywood College, Scranton, Penn­sylvania.
While there he will also con­duct
a seminar on ecumenism.
Rev. James J. Megivern, C.M., re­ports
a busy lecture schedule for the
past semester during which he pre­sented
18 talks and a paper. He spoke
on "Current Trends in Roman Cath­olic
Theology" to the Greater Bethle-hem
Ministerial Association in Bethle­hem,
Pennsylvania; on "Current Christ­ology"
to the Brooklyn Diocesan Pas­toral
Institute; on "Christology of the
Gospels" to priests of the Philadelphia
Archdiocese at St. Charles Seminary,
Overbrook, Pennsylvania; on "The
Eucharist" at St. Francis Seminary,
Loretto, Pennsylvania, and also at the
Immaculate Conception Seminary in
Huntington, N. Y.; on "The Gospel
and Change" to the Confraternity of
Christian Doctrine in St. Patrick's Pa­rish,
Huntington, N. Y.; on "The Sac­raments"
to the Catholic school teach­ers
of the Diocese of Rockville Center;
on "Change in the Church" to the staff
of the Long Island Catholic in Rock­ville
Center; on "Peace" to the January
meeting of the U. S. Bishops' Com­mission
on World Justice and Peace,
and also to the seminary of Our Lady
of the Angels in Albany; and on "Con­temporary
Ecclesiology" to the Con­fraternity
of Christian Doctrine of the
Diocese of Albany at Siena College in
Loudonville, N. Y. His paper on
"Christian Ministry" was read before
the Regional Convention of the Cath­olic
Theological Society of America,
which was held here on March 23.
HUMANITAS
St. John's University
Jamaica, N. Y. 11432

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

t Humanitas
VOLUME 3, NO. 4 SPRING, J 968 ST. JOHN'S UNIVERSITY
HUMANITAS is a publication of the President's
Advisory Council on Humanities and Professional Research
Dr. Stanislaus Akielaszak Dr. Elisabeth J. Doyle
Chairman Editor
John M. O'Shaughnessy
Publications Editor
Cover design and additional art by Prof. Claude Ponsot, Fine Arts.
Cover photographs courtesy United Nations.
CONTENTS
Educating For Peace .. . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . .. Page 3
Heretic, 1968: one who "denies the primacy of peace and
looks upon war as indif/erent or thinks it can ever be waged
indiscriminately"
English Literature and the Publication Syndrome .............. Page 7
Pity the poor Ph.D., especially the younger one, in English.
Filling the Slate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 8
A noted aut/iority on the vice-presidency offers some
election year thoughts on the folly of choosing running mates
who differ widely with one another on basic issues.
Music and Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . Page 1 O
In which "musical composition is seen to be a logical process
involving both inductive and deductive methods."
How Different are the Germans? .. ...................................... Page 11
An interesting comparison of two educational systems by
one who knows both intimately, as student and educator.
Survey of Alumni of the Political Science
Graduate Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .. Page 12
SIU graduate Political Science degree recipients found to
be well prepared, occupationally and for further study.
Machiavelli e ii Machiavellismo tra la Storia la Politica .... .. Page 14
The influence of Machiavelli upon Politics, History and
Philosophy.
Copernicus, Hooke, and Simplicity . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 15
A twentieth century philosopher explores the mind and
method of Robert Hooke, seventeenth century natural
philosopher and defender of Copernicus' view of the Universe.
Also in this issue:
Shakespeare Quiz, page 5 . . . Special Programs, page 6
... Poetry, pages 6, 19 ... Faculty Notes, page 20-22.
Convocation : Education for
Peace .. March 22-2 7
KEYNOTE SPEAKER is James Finn,
Editor of Worldview and author of
"Protest: Pacificism and Politics".
BRADFORD BACHRACH
PRINCIPAL ADDRESS at the closing
dinner will be delivered by Most Rev.
John J . Dougherty, chairman of the
U. S. Bishops Commission on World
Justice and Peace.
OTHER SPEAKERS and panelists in­clude:
Dr. Tom Stonier, biologist and
author of Nuclear Disaster; Rev. Rich­ard
McSorley, S.J., of the School of
Foreign Service, Georgetown Univer­sity;
Dr. Gordon Zahn, author of War,
Conscience and Dissent; Rev. Daniel
Maguire, Professor of Moral Theology,
Catholic University of America; Rev.
Anthony Schillaci, O.P., of the Na­tional
Film Study Project, Fordham
University; Hon. Francis Plimpton,
former U. S. Ambassador to the Uni­ted
Nations; Mrs. Eleanor Norton of
the American Civil Liberties Union ;
Professor Saul Mendlovitz of Rutgers
University; and Robert Theobald, Brit­ish
economist and author.
Educating for Peace
by
REV. JAM ES MEGIVERN, C.M., Theology
IN A SHORTER period than one man's lifetime, we
have witnessed the bloody slaughter of no less than
one hundred million of our fellow men. And this feat was
accomplished by what has blandly come to be called
"conventional" warfare. Our newly acquired nuclear po­tential
promises to dwarf these figures, for we are now
capable of unheard of records of mass annihilation, there­by
demonstrating our clear superiority to all previous
generations.
In the face of these awesome possibilities, the whole
process of higher education becomes a series of charades
so long as it continues to ignore the problem of war.
The importance of any problem is properly calculated
by the threat posed by its non-resolution. On this basis,
the medical profession is devoting great energy to the
search for a cure for cancer, since its presence negates all
other relative successes in maintaining human health. If this
same criterion were seriously applied to our present world
situation, it is difficult to imagine what problem could
possibly pre-empt that of war and peace in our order of
priorities.
"Hawk" and "dove" do not exhaust the vocabulary of
today's political ornithologist; to them must be added the
much more common species "ostrich", with the groves of
Academe as its natural habitat. Fortunately, however,
there are signs that things are changing in this regard, and
a number of serious organizations are working to call the
attention of educators to this crucial area.
An encouraging instance of student initiative has resul­ted
in the formation of the Student Forum on International
Order and World Peace (16 West 46th St., N.Y.), which
already has sponsored four conferences around the coun­try,
in an effort to stir up awareness of the problem.
"Most colleges and universities", declares one of their
statements, "do not offer their students courses on the
problems of war prevention and the establishment of
minimum world order. This is true of all disciplines and
departments, even of political science, international rela­tions,
and law. There is little opportunity for the student
to confront directly, systematically, and rigorously one of
the major issues of our time." As tomorrow's leaders,
these students have good reason to be concerned, for to­day's
leaders, unless things change considerably and quick­ly,
may leave them nothing to lead.
An even more significant development, however, is that
which is taking place among a growing number of educa­tors.
It beg'm in Paris in March, 1963, when a group of
concerned members of the academic community decided
to make an all-out effort to turn the direction of the mo­dern
university toward the pursuit of peace. The target
date is January J 969, the site chosen is the eternal city,
Rome, and the event is called The World Conference on
the Role of Universities in the Quest for Peace.
To make the Conference truly effective, the planners
realized that extensive spadework was necessary. Regional
meetings were held at the National University of San
Marcos in Lima, Peru , in November, 1964; at the Univer­sity
of Ibadan in Nigeria soon after, and at the Internation­al
Center of the State University of New York at Oyster
Bay last June.
Four commissions are at work in various areas: 1) on
the impact of science on international affairs and social
change; 2) on problems of international conflict and peace­ful
solution; 3) on economic and social development as a
common enterprise; and 4) on the education of teachers
and the public for international understanding.
The agenda for the Conference to be held at the Uni­versity
of Rome from January 13 to January 17, 1969, is
two-pronged. The first area of concentration is that of
university teaching: how to transform it in content, me­thods,
and materials so that it will no longer be so scan­dalously
unconcerned with the essential task of peace­making.
The second is that of organizing inter-university
cooperation, so as to prove effectively to the world that
the academic need not be synonymo~s with the irrelevant
and myopic.
Whither the Catholic Educator?
Our special concern should be the degree of involve­ment
of the Catholic 2cademic world. A glance at the
impressive list of participants in the Oyster Bay Confer­ence,
however, reveals that St. Louis was apparently the
only Catholic University represented. It will be ironic if,
in the very shadow of the Vatican next January, this most
significant event in the search for peace takes place with­out
significant Catholic participation.
There is much food for thought here. One can easily
become cynical and conclude that there is something about
being a Catholic that makes one uncatholic. Protestations
to the contrary are of little help when so much evidence
has to be swept under the rug.
Granted that the problem is not unique to our age. The
famous Dutch j•1rist, Grotius, a contemporary of St.
Vincent dePaul , noted in his classic treatise De Belli oe
Pacis that in the Christian world of his day "I observed
a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barba­rous
races would be ashamed of; I observed that men
ru shed to arms for slight causes or no cause at all. And
when arms are once taken up, there is no longer any re­spect
for law, divine or human; it is as if, in accordance
with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose for
the committing of all crimes." ( Prolegomena, par. 28).
Many persons are concerned about signs of decreasing
interest in the Church in our day. They search for explana­tions
in various directions, but much of the problem is
certainly rooted here. The yawning chasm between the
teaching of Christ and the attitudes of Christians has to be
the prototype of all "credibility gaps." The reasons for
it are undoubtedly complex, but the fact is clear. When
it comes to a question of priorities, it is often nationalism
that is the basic religion, and Christianity is acceptable
-3-
only so long as it allows itself to be twisted into a sorry
support for the national military program.
Carleton J. H. Hayes described this in classical style over
four decades ago in his Essays on Nationalism. Further
evidence of it is found in the malaise which modern
Christians feel when confronted with the Sermon on the
Mount, as compared with the ease with which they can
listen to a militarist such as Hellmuth von Moltke, who
once wrote, "Perpetual peace is a dream - and not even
a beautiful dream - and War is an integral part of God's
ordering of the Universe. In War, Man's noblest virtues
come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty
and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop short of
offering up Life itself. Without War the world would be­come
swamped in Materialism." ( cf. Arnold Toynbee,
War and Civilization, p. 16).
Such is the mythology to which we are subject. The
shortcomings in this regard are recognized today, at least
by some serious scholars, such as Roland Bainton in his
Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace and Stanley
Windass in Christianity versus Violence. But the criticism
they level against past generations seems close to praise
when compared with what may await our generation.
In the Second World War we suffered a breakdown of
morality that has as yet scarcely been realized. Some of it
was the result of naked vengeance; but the fact remains that,
somewhere in the middle of that conflict, we allowed
ourselves to slip into the immoral tactics of the fascists
we were trying to defeat. Unconditional surrender and
collective extermination came to be so taken for granted
that there was hardly a protest when it came time to in­cinerate
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Road to Moral Chaos
The pathos of the resultant situation is well expressed
by Lewis Mumford: "The total nature of our moral break­down,
accurately predicted a half century ago - along
with the atom bomb - by Henry Adams, can be gauged
by a single fact: most Americans do not realize that this
change has taken place or, worse, that it makes any differ­ence.
They have no consciousness of either the magnitude
of their collective sin or the fact that, by their silence, they
have individually condoned it ... Many of our professed
religious and moral leaders have steadily shrunk from
touching this subject." ("The Morals of Extermination"
in Break-through to Peace, p. 20).
That final sentence brings us to the question of what a
Catholic university in contemporary America should be
doing about world peace. Vatican II did not hesitate to
~ell all Catholic educators that their "most weighty task
1s the effort to instruct all in fresh sentiments of peace."
Much of the clarity and forcefulness of the Church's
teaching in this regard, especially since Pope John's Pacem
in Terris, must obviously be seen as compensation for past
failures . Christians have been singularly successful in pull­ing
God's mantle over their campaigns of fratricide,
whether it be in the Crusades or during the subsequent
"wars of religion," thereby distorting the Prince of Peace
into their favorite War-Lord.
The Christian educator is thus assigned a key area for
"aggiornamento". A university that claims to be Catholic,
and is not pulling its weight in promoting a reorientation
of Christian thinking about war and peace, is being un­faithful
to its mandate.
For those who find the whole phenomenon of change
in the Church difficult to accept, the temptation to ignore
or dismiss the progress represented in recent Church
teaching will be strong. Curiously, it is too often the social
teaching of the Church that many Catholics succeed in
ignoring, while still managing to call themselves Catholic.
As a result, a would-be Catholic university has an added
responsibility to help clarify this scandalous anomaly by
putting all the cards on the table.
Instead of allowing a Catholic to be defined in terms
of Sunday Mass obligation, true Christian doctrine puts
the emphasis elsewhere. "A man is a heretic when he does
not admit that all men are brothers; he is a heretic when
he does not admit that he ought to love his enemies; he is
a hereti~ when he thinks he ought to love wealth and try
to acqmre as much of it as possible, even if he takes pains
not sin ... " (Abbe J. Leclercq, "Are There Moral He­resies?"
in Cross Currents of Psychiatry and Catholic
Morality). We might add that he is a heretic if he denies
the primacy of peace and looks upon war as indifferent,
or thinks it can ever be waged indiscriminately or without
the constant search for alternative solutions.
. The responsibility that is ours as a Catholic university
1s compounded by the fact that we are an American uni­versity.
Our tradition has been one that glorifies violence.
Born in revolution and expanded by massacre of the In­dians,
we have gone from war to war and painted this
historr ~n unrelieved hues of nobility, glory and heroism.
All this 1s fine for a Fourth of July harangue, but a univer­~
ity should be more sophisticated. Otherwise, a mentality
1s produced that is a real hazard to our fellow man. One
gets locked into a position where recourse to violence is
the automatic answer. Our "western" movies bear constant
-4-
witness to the prevalence of this myth in our society. In
a showdown we always reach for the gun.
It is one of the ironic features of our present situation
that while this formula is once more endorsed as valid in
Vietnam, there is a great outcry and furor when by simple
logic it is applied domestically by those condemned to
the ghetto. Yet one cannot have it both ways: if total
violence is the accepted language for settling disputes, it
will be spoken at home as well as abroad. The point is,
unless serious efforts are made in educating to alternatives,
the present heresy of solution-by-total-violence will con­tinue
to prevail. A society should be able to rely on edu­cational
institutions to recognize and foster what is best
rather than what is worst in its tradition.
A further argument can be drawn from the fact that
we are not only a Catholic university, not only Americans,
but also members of the nuclear age. Once again it is
simply a question of common sense. Times have changed.
Man has at his disposal weapons capable of annihilating
civilization. Thus a border dispute is no longer a border
dispute, but a spark with the potential of igniting the
conflagration of the universe. Kenneth Boulding has said
that "if the human race is to survive, it will have to change
its ways of thinking more in the next 25 years than in the
last 25,000." If educators are not laboring to effect this
change, who will? One way or the other, we are faced
with monumental change. The only question is whether
it will be the fruitful change which a university worthy of
the name can help to bring about, or the change that will
be announced by a global mushroom cloud.
Most of the foregoing has dealt with the area of motiva­tion,
of reasons why a contemporary American Catholic
university should have a special commitment and interest
in promoting the thoughts and actions that contribute to
world peace. As always, the transition from the "why" to
the "how" is more difficult. It presupposes a group of
people sufficiently convinced of the importance of the
work to be willing to spend time on it. This, as we have
seen, is what is as yet quite absent from the scene, especi­ally
among Catholics.
The University of Chicago fostered the work of Quincy
Wright (A Study of War) , Harvard encouraged the con­tribution
of Pitirim Sorokin; the University of Michigan
promotes the Journal of Conflict Resolution as well as the
Journal of Behavioural Science, including many studies in
the area of peace research. The International Peace Re­search
Institute in Oslo, Norway, publishes its findings in
the Journal of Peace Research, while the University of
Pennsylvania sponsors the Peace Research Society Inter­national.
Princeton has the Center for International
Studies; Columbia, Northwestern, Yale, and Stanford all
have institutes.
In Manhattan, we have the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, the Center for War/ Peace Studies,
the Council on Religion and International Affairs, and any
number of other organizations of revelance. The significant
absence of Catholic participation, interest, contribution,
or awareness of this vital dimension of the educational
task is disturbing, to say the least. Manhattan College de­cided
to break the ice with its Pacem-in-Terris Institute,
and it would be most encouraging to see a few other Ca­tholic
institutions follow suit. All it takes is a handful of
people with enough sense of responsibility and willingness
to collaborate in exploring the essentials of human survival.
Shakespeare for Televiewers
by
VERONICA M.S. KENNEDY, English
The following are summaries of Shakespearian plays as
they might appear in TV Guide. Identify them:
1. A stagestruck student investigates a murder.
2. Teenagers struggle against prejudice.
3. A family drifts apart because of greed and sex.
4. A wayward youth causes his father anxiety.
5. Interracial strife and juvenile delinquency plague a
retired general.
6. An immigrant girl struggles to find her identity and
achieves happiness.i
7. A young country girl beomes a doctor and finds
romance.
8. Cave men help a princess in disguise.
9. A mother's boy makes good.
10. A small town Casanova gets his comeuppance.
11. Personal problems confuse an immigrant who has
joined the Army.
12. Coeds charm eggheads into romance.
13. A slumming socialite mingles with the underworld.
14. A cripple gets his revenge on society.
15. An alcoholic finds romance in the Orient.
(Answers on Page 22)
-5-
OTHER SPECIAL PROGRAMS
In addition to the Education for Peace Convocation, a number of other special
programs have been or will be offered by various departments of the Univer­sity.
Some of them are described below.
ASIAN STUDIES CENTER
Summer Study in Chinese Language
and Culture
For the eighth consecutive year, St.
John's University will offer scholar­ships
for summer study in Chinese
language and culture, as a result of a
grant from the Sino-American Cultural
Society in Washington, D. C.
During the Summer of 1968, Chi­nese
language courses will be offered
on four levels-elementary, intermedi­ate,
semi-advanced, and advanced. The
culture courses will treat the history,
government, and politics of East Asia.
The program, interdisciplinary in na­ture,
is conducted by the University's
Center of Asian Studies in cooperation
with the Departments of History, Po­litical
Science, and Modern Foreign
Languages.
FINE ARTS
The Dept. of Fine Arts is presenting
a four part series on Film during the
current semester. The first program
took place on Thursday, March 14th
when Dr. Richard J. Meyer, Director
of School Television Services for
WNDT/Channel 13 in New York
City spoke on: "D. W. Griffith: Father
of the Film as an Art Form." Three
Griffith films were shown: "The Lone­dale
Operator" ( 1911) with Blanche
Sweet; "The Musketeers of Pig Alley"
( 1912) with Lillian Gish and "The
Avenging Conscience" ( 1914) with
H. B. Walthall. Dr. Meyer was form­erly
the Head of the Communications
Department at Wichita State Univer­sity,
Wichita, Kansas, and faculty ad­visor
to the Wichita Film Society. He
has written articles on film and com-
HAIKU*
by
LYNN S. MARTIN, English
Plum blossoms falling
In the mist along the road
Traveller's footprints.
,:, Editor's Note: The haiku is a class­ical
Japanese verse form which has
three lines of five, seven, and five
syllables each.
munications media for Film Comment Several courses in the field have
magazine, NAEB JOURNAL, The been recommended as additions to the
Journal of Broadcasting and A-V Com- curriculum. They include Linguistics
munications Review. Coordinators of 150, Introduction to Linguistics - a
the series are Prof. Jordan Myers of three-hour course on the study and
the Fine Arts Dept. and senior English use of languages, their classification
major Sal Fallica. and diffusion, types of phonetic change,
The second program in the series semantic change, and the history of lin­will
be given on Monday, April 1st "' guistic science in the nineteenth and
when Gordon Hitchens, Editor of twentieth centuries (knowledge of at
Film Comment magazine will lecture least one language in addition to En­on:
"The American Independent Film glish would be a prerequisite for this
Makers." The final two programs will course) ; and English 14, Structural
be announced at a later date. and Transformational Grammatical
LINGUISTICS
In view of the nationwide and state­wide
interest in linguistics, especially
the adoption and distribution by the
New York State Education Depart­ment
of textbooks with a linguistic
orientation, Father Devine has asked
Dr. Stanislaus Akielaszek ( Classical
Languages), Dr. John Cosentini (Mo­dern
Foreign Languages: French), Dr.
Thomas D. Houchin (Speech and
Theatre), Dr. Lynn S. Martin (Eng­lish),
Dr. Hilda Radzin (Modern For­eign
Languages: German), and Dr.
John Reynolds (Modern Foreign Lan­guages:
Spanish) to serve on a per­manent
Interdepartmental Committee
on Linguistics. Dr. Houchin will serve
as chairman and Dr. Martin as secre­tary
of the group.
The committee's objectives are: to
coordinate present linguistic course
offerings throughout the university; to
encourage linguistic orientation of
appropriate existing courses, develop­ment
of additional linguistic courses
where necessary, and more efficient
use of existing university resourses in
linguistics; and to stimulate appropri­ate
departments, such as Mathematics,
Philosophy, Psychology, and Anthro­pology
and Sociology, which could
contribute to a program in linguistics,
to develop courses in this area. The
committee hopes to be able to offer a
graduate "Introduction to Linguistics"
in the Fall Semester 1969 and hopes
that the English Department will be
able to offer an undergraduate "Struc­tural
and Transformational Gramma­tical
Analysis" beginning at the same
time.
-6-
Analysis-a three-hour course dealing
with inadequacies and inaccuracies of
traditional English grammar; modern
attempts to describe the functioning of
English language more accurately;
structural approaches, and the trans­formational
approach.
In addition, the following courses
which are already in the University
catalog have been recommended for
inclusion in the interdepartmental pro­gram:
English 210. Old English; En­glish
211. Beowulf; French 110.
French Phonetics; French 303. History
of the French Language; Spanish 110.
Spanish Phonetics; Spanish 303. His­tory
of the Spanish Language; Ro­mance
Linguistics 302. Comparative
Romance Linguiistics; Speech 81.
Phonetics.
In the School of Education: Edu­cation
71.5. Secondary School Me­thods.
Language - English Composi­tion,
oral English and Literature;
Education 71. 7. Secondary School
Methods. Modern Foreign Language;
Education 71.13. Secondary School
Methods. Latin.
Also the following infrequently
taught languages: Chinese 207. Chi­nese
Dialects; Chinese 208. Gramma­tical
Structure; Chinese 302. Chinese
Linguistics; Chinese 303. History of
the Chinese Language; Russian 1 ;2.
Elementary Russian; Russian 3 ;4.
Intermediate Russian; Swahili 101 ;102.
Conversational Swahili.
The chairman of the committee,
Dr. Houchin, would appreciate hearing
from both faculty members and stu­dents
with a special interest or prepara­tion
in linguistics.
English Literature and the Publication Syndrome
by
RICHARD J. DIRCKS, English
YEARS AGO we were just faculty. Now we're senior
faculty and junior faculty, tenured faculty and unten­ured
faculty, Ph.D.'s and non-Ph.D.'s, and perhaps most
crucial of all, publishing Ph.D.'s and non-publishing
Ph.D.'s. Each group has its pressing problems, but the
academic dilemma faced by the non-publishing Ph.D. is
as disturbing as any. He is asked to achieve a publication
record or face extinction. But time and the statistics of
research publication in English language and literature
reveal odds that are distinctly unfavorable.
FiQding an outlet for research is highly competitive and
the screening of material submitted to journals rigorous.
Most of the leading periodicals subject material to evalu­ation
by three specialists before final acceptance. The
young scholar, moreover, is in competition for space with
the many thousands of senior professors who also must
publish in order to maintain their competitive positions.
Revealing statistics are presented by John Lavelle in an
article in the November, 1966 issue of Proceedings of the
Modern Language Association, the leading critical journal
in modern languages. He tells us that of 600 research
articles submitted to PMLA during 1965 only seventy
were published. These included articles dealing with all
other modern foreign languages in addition to English.
The Philological Quarterly, a highly respected and long
established journal, maintained the same ratio, publishing
40 of 330 offerings. English Literary History, with a more
specialized approach focussing on literary history, publish­ed
30 out of 300. The more recently established Texas
Studies in Literature and Language accepted 3 8 of 251
submissions. Another comparatively recent periodical,
Criticism, received 225 articles and accepted 14. The
length of time between acceptance and publication in these
journals ranged from nine to eighteen months. Accepted
material was screened by three readers in each of the
journals mentioned, except ELH which required two.
Lavelle publishes statistics on almost all journals in the
field, and an examination of them will confirm that this
is a representative selection of the more prestigious
journals.
The new Ph.D. faces the prospect of numerous rejec­tions
even if his work is of the highest quality, and each
rejection may cost as much as six months of time before
a decision is reached. The typical new Ph.D. begins with
an effort to sharpen and publish chapters of his dissertati@n
for submission to scholarly journals. In rare instances; he
may be fortunate enough to have a university press pub­lish
his study in its entirety. In either case, he risks the
censure of the administrator who may observe that he
reaJJy has done no research beyond his degree and hardly
merits promotion. The fact of the matter is that in almost
every case in which a thesis is published, whether as a
book or a series of articles, additional work has been done,
at least of a confirmatory nature, and the work has been
scrutinized by impartial and discriminating specialists.
Another area of difficulty for the young scholar is a
widespread misunderstanding about notes. In many dis­ciplines,
the fact that the result of months of research is
often productive of only a few pages of printed text is
routinely accepted. In literature, there too often is the
expectation that quantity is somehow related to quality.
This is obviously not so, and short articles or notes often
contain considerable significant material. Curiously, it is
often as difficult to publish notes as longer articles, and
the waiting time is frequently as great. Notes and Queries,
the century old publication of the Oxford University Press,
accepts notes varying from a few paragraphs to 2,500
words. Although the periodical generally tries to publish
within eighteen months, delays for longer notes may ex­tend
to two years. Contributors to the more recently
established American Notes and Queries face the same
delays. Although notes are also published in English
Language Notes which accepted 60 of 353 submissions
in 1965, a few of the journals that publish longer articles
also accept notes.
Catholic higher education contributes relatively little
to the publication of literary research. Thought, a contem­porary
review, and Traditio, dealing with medieval studies,
are specialized outlets of significance. But there is no
major journal in which research in the broad areas of
English and American literature can find a home. Rena­sence
generally limits its material to studies of religious
implications of contemporary subjects. Some of the more
popular Catholic magazines such as The Critic, Common­weal,
and America publish a limited number of contempo­rary
critical essays.
The difficulty encountered in research, writing, and ac­tual
publication is, however, only the initial challenge the
new Ph.D. faces. The odds are escalated by the procedure
followed in evaluating applications for promotion and
tenure. In many cases final decisions are reached by in­dividuals
with no experience in the discipline of the can­didate.
Consider, for example, the plight of the anthro­pologist
as he attempts to judge an article dealing with
dramatic tension in Joyce, or the engineer who would evalu­ate
an article on psychological motivation in Shakespeare's
comedies. Yet this is essentially the system that the young
Ph.D. must try to beat, because personnel and budget
committees on the college level seldom have a majority
composed of scholars in the aspiring professor's own or
related areas. The myth that the problem of publication
is the same in all disciplines persists and is advanced most
devotedly by those with the least knowledgeable experi­ence.
Optimism should prevail, however, for in time the
rewarding reality of the first published article will come.
The months or years of research and writing will seem
short; the soul-benefitting experience of submission, re­jection,
submission, and final acceptance will reward the
heart with a rich glow of satisfaction; and the pleasure
of presenting a fresh-off-the-press offprint to an adminis­trative
superior will be a moment of triumph. The young
scholar can be certain of receiving warm words of en­couragement:
"And what else, my lad?"
Come to think of it, wouldn't it be -nice to be just faculty
again?
-7-
Filling The Slate
by
IRVING G. WILLIAMS, History
FOR ANY American to profess unawareness that 1968
is a presidential election year is inconceivable amid
today's flurry of presidential preference primaries, willing
"non-candidates," peace candidates, third party candi­dates,
and ex-candidates, Election fever is on us once
again-but with a difference. This year, the task of select­ing
vice-presidential candidates for each of the party slates
assumes more importance than it ever has before.
Where, in the past, geographic balance was often more
important to a winning slate than the personal compat­ibility
of the presidential and vice-presidential choices,
this year the question of the vice-president's political
philosophy will asume overriding importance. The im­portance
is not limited, furthermore, to the mere matter
of electing a pair of winners to the two top offices in the
land. In this last third of the twentieth century, it would
be nothing less than disastrous to choose for the vice­presidency
anyone who is not himself of presidential
capabilities and/ or who is out of tune with the president.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt must have been thinking
along these lines when, even before he ran for Governor
of New York, he wrote in March, 1928, to one of the
Democratic professionals:
I have been convinced for several months that the Vice-
Presidential candidate should come from the South ... .
Cordell Hull would make an excellent choice .... I . . .
believe that the nominee ... should be chosen with the
thought that the Almighty might call on him to succeed
to the presidency, and Hull would make a fine President.
Hull, of course, never made even Vice-President; but
Roosevelt undoubtedly was thinking of the crippling illness
which nearly carried President Wilson off in 1919. He
also was probably recalling his own unsuccessful cam­paign
for the vice-presidency as Governor Cox's running
mate in 1920. Roosevelt, of all people, would be aware
of how suddenly grave illness strikes and destroys all
personal and political plans and time tables. Much later
on, the ailing Roosevelt of 1944 could not know that his
approval of Harry S. Truman to run with him would result
in the latter's being called by "the Almighty" to succeed
him eighty-three days after the start of the fourth term.
And the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 only
re-enforces for our generation the idea that the second
man on the ticket is a putative President of the United
States.
There have been eight occasions of transfer of the
presidency by reason of the death of the incumbent. We
shall refer to these very shortly. But can anyone doubt
there will be a ninth? Since no one can tell where or when
the next succession by death may occur, the only sensible
thing to do is to take due precaution to cushion the shock
when the unexpected happens. Painful as it is for Repub­licans
to contemplate it, perhaps the greatest legacy left
by John F. Kennedy to the American nation was his Vice­President.
Certainly the transition from the one to the
other was the smoothest during parlous times we have
ever experienced. Thus perhaps the most fateful party
decision JFK made was at the 1960 Democrat Convention
when he proferred the vice-presidential nomination to his
erstwhile majority leader and rival for the presidential
nomination.
This year's presidential election will be the first held
since the adoption of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the
Constitution in 1967. This amendment provides pro­cedures
for the vice-president to be an Acting President
of the United States in case of the President's suffering a
crippling illness. In the whole history of the nation we
have never had an Acting President. We enter upon terra
incognita in this regard. But one thing is certain: the
likelihood of a vice-president exercising presidential func­tions
has been increased. On at least three occasions in
the past there would have been opportunity for temporary
or earlier permanent successions to the exercise of presi­dential
functions if this constitutional clarification had
been on the books. Consider, for example, the eighty day
period that elapsed between the shooting of President
Garfield and his demise in 1881; the many months of
Wilson's stroke and partial paralysis in 1919-1920, and
Eisenhower's three illnesses in 1955 and later. Nor has
President Johnson himself been beyond hospitalization
and surgery on occasion. He is also a member of long­standing
in the coronary club. We can therefore reason­ably
expect that in the future Vice-Presidents will ad­minister
the presidency on at least a temporary basis. For
now there are no constitutional and legal doubts that in
such circumstances a vice-president is simply a stand-in,
a locum tenens for the ailing chief executive.
The importance, then, of selecting vice-presidential
choices with the two qualifications heretofore mentioned
is underscored. To repeat them: he must be presidential
timber himself and he must be politically, philosophically,
and personally attuned to the presidential nominee.
T.R.: Theory and Practice
This latter aspect of the question is what the Republican
Roosevelt had in mind during the 1896 campaign when
he wrote: "It is an unhealthy thing to have the Vice­President
and President represented by principles so far
apart that the succession of one to the place of the other
means a change as radical as any party overturn." The
additional possibility of temporary successions in the
future only re-enforces Theodore Roosevelt's argument.
It is unthinkable, for instance, that a moderate Republican
President, temporarily felled by some incapacitating illness,
should have his office administered by a conservative
Republican Acting President totally unsymphathetic to
the policy and personnel of the Administration. There
would be chaos. The same would hold true, of course, if
a Goldwater-type President should be temporarily (or
permanently) replaced by a Javits-type Vice-President.
It was the supreme irony that only four years after T.R.
had made his pronouncement that the national ticket should
be consistent at both ends, he himself was placed on the
party's ticket with President McKinley. The latter person-
-8-
ally disliked his Vice-President and had little to do with
him after the campaign; yet within a year, T.R. took over
from the assassinated President. Roosevelt would have
been the first to admit that his "Square Deal" policy was
quite opposite to the "full dinner pail" philosophy of
McKinley. T.R.'s succession proved his own argument
that the incompatibility of the 1900 Republican choices
caused in the circumstances "a change as radical as any
party overturn."
Republicans almost seem to have had a suicidal history
in this matter, for from the viewpoint of party majority
sentiment, the wrong vice-presidents have been in office
when Republican presidents have died.
Succession; the Historical Context
Let us consider the history of death-successions, the
only kind of accidental successions the nation has had
to date. They started before the Republican party was yet
born, but by general consensus, its ancestor was the Whig
party and it was under them that the curse started.
In 1840, the Whigs won their first victory over the
Democrats with a general (Harrison) and an ex-Democrat
(Tyler). One month after inauguration the general was
dead (of natural causes), and the Virginian ex-Democrat
took over. Former President John Quincy Adam's re­action
to this melancholy event was, it "places in the
Executive chair a man never thought of for it by any­body."
Theodore Roosevelt's own characterization of the
aftermath of the Tyler succession is apropos: "The presi­dency
fell into the hands of a man who had but a corpo­ral's
guard of supporters in the nation, who proceeded
to oppose all the measures of the immense majority of
those who elected him." We might add that not only did
the Whigs try to impeach Tyler and successfully read him
out of the party, but they also lost the next election. They
won again in 1848 with another general and a Whig from
New York (Fillmore) but once more saw their President
die a natural death (during the crisis of 1850). Nor was
Fillmore, though able, rewarded by a nomination the
next time around. The Democrats won in 1852, and the
Whig party disappeared permanently shortly after.
Rising from ashes of the defunct Whigs, the Repub­licans
won through to victory for the first time in 1860
with an ex-Whig, Abraham Lincoln, and an ex-Democrat,
Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. They won, as all parties do,
because the states they captured were the right ones to
give an electoral majority; but they collected only 40
per cent of the popular vote in a field of four tickets.
When it was election time again, the Civil War had beef